Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle -- the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.

Not until we dare to regard ourselves as a nation, not until we respect ourselves, can we gain the esteem of others, or rather only then will it come of its own accord.

Albert Einstein

Do not avoid doing what you love because you fear that it will only result in poverty or lack. If you fear this, then this is exactly what will happen.

Stephen Richards

The circumstances of your life have uniquely qualified you to make a contribution. And if you don't make that contribution, nobody else can make it.

Rabbi Harold S. Kushner

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

Alan Turing

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.

Diane Ackerman, A Natural Histor

In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.

George Carlin

We possess only the happiness we are able to understand.

Maurice Maeterlinck

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.

Oscar Wilde

What a piece of work is a man how noble in reason how infinite in faculty in form and moving how express and admirable in action how like an angel in apprehension how like a god

William Shakespeare

Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. [...] A human being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like to answer, and say, 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to say' - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It's never acceptable to target civilians. It violates the Geneva Accords, it violates the international law of war and it violates all principles of morality.

Alan Dershowitz

Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or on the ball.

James Patrick Murray