The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.

A mistake is always forgivable, rarely excusable and always unacceptable.

Robert Fripp

... when someone sees a soul disturbed and unable to see something, he won't laugh mindlessly, but he'll take into consideration whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brillance.

Plato

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Samuel Johnson

The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.

Plato

I start where the last man left off.

Thomas Alva Edison

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.

Richard Dawkins

Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.

Jerry Saltz

Judge a man's character by what he finds ridiculous.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor he takes my measure anew every time he sees me, whilst all the rest go on with their old measurements, and expect them to fit me.

George Bernard Shaw

Underneath this stone doth lie As much beauty as could die; Which in life did harbor give To more virtue than doth live.

Ben Jonson

No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.

Edward Dahlberg

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.

Samuel Adams