When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, if afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

H. L. Mencken

We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics.

Bill Vaughan

Scruples, temptations, and fears, and cutting perplexities of the heart, are often the lot of the most excellent persons.

Thomas Kempis

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

Oscar Wilde

If I be the first of us to die,Let grief not blacken long your sky.Be bold yet modest in your grieving.There is a change but not a leaving.For just as death is part of life,The dead live on forever in the living.And all the gathered riches of our journey,The moments shared, the mysteries explored,The steady layering of intimacy stored,The things that made us laugh or weep or sing,The joy of sunlit snow or first unfurling of the spring,The wordless language of look and touch,The knowing,Each giving and each taking,These are not flowers that fade,Nor trees that fall and crumble,Nor are they stone,For even stone cannot the wind and rain withstandAnd mighty mountain peaks in time reduce to sand.What we were, we are.What we had, we have.A conjoined past imperishably present.So when you walk the wood where once we walkedtogetherAnd scan in vain the dappled bank beside you for my shadow,Or pause where we always did upon the hill to gaze across the land,And spotting something, reach by habit for my hand,And finding none, feel sorrow start to steal upon you,Be still.Close your eyes.Breathe.Listen for my footfall in your heart.I am not gone but merely walk within you.

Nicholas Evans, from The Smoke J

Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

George Orwell, Shooting an Eleph

Today's environment is beginning to threaten today's organizations, finding them seriously deficient in their nervous system design.... The degree of coordination, perception, rational adaptation, etc., which will appear in the next generation of human organizations will drive our present organizational forms, with their clumsy nervous systems, into extinction.

Douglas Engelbart, 1970

Winning is great, but if it's not enough then then you'll never have enough!

Stephen Richards

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

Maya Angelou

Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.

J. August Strindberg

What a fool does in the end, the wise do in the beginning.

Proverb