One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won't jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.

A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.

Thomas Carlyle

The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.

Tony Benn

It is true that when we take chances, we stand to lose. But it is also true that we will never win anything if we never even enter the game. Lucky people are aware of the possibility of losing, and indeed they may lose often. But since the chances they take are small, the losses tend to be small. By being willing to accept small losses, they put themselves in position to make large gains.

Max Gunther

One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to battle for freedom and truth.

Henrik Ibsen

Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.

Sigmund Freud

Science has always been too dignified to invent a good backscratcher.

Don Marquis

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.

Italo Calvino

Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.

Booker T. Washington

He conquers twice who conquers himself in victory.

Jyrus

It's too bad that one has to conceive of sports as being the only arena where risks are, for all of life is risk exercise. That's the only way to live more freely, and more interestingly.

William Sloane Coffin Jr.

Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.

Virginia Woolf

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

Alain de Botton