It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.

I'd like to put in a vote for the intrinsic fascination of science.

Joshua Lederberg

Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor, but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but--this is the essential point--generally persist from birth to death. 'Hence the anomalous individuals that you find in every class of society. You find writers like Wells and Bennett who have grown immensely rich and have yet preserved intact their lower-middle-class Nonconformist prejudices; you find millionaires who cannot pronounce their aitches; you find petty shopkeepers whose income is far lower than that of the bricklayer and who, nevertheless, consider themselves (and are considered) the bricklayer's social superiors; you find board-school boys ruling Indian provinces and public-school men touting vacuum cleaners. If social stratification corresponded precisely to economic stratification, the public-school man would assume a cockney accent the day his income dropped below L200 a year. But does he? On the contrary, he immediately becomes twenty times more Public School than before. He clings to the Old School Tie as to a life-line. And even the aitchless millionaire, though sometimes he goes to an elocutionist and leams a B.B.C. accent, seldom succeeds in disguising himself as completely as he would like to. It is in fact very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan

It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.

Greil Marcus

How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown

William Shakespeare

I've never dropped anyone I believed in.

Marilyn Monroe

It's easy to let life deteriorate into making a living instead of making a life. It's not the hours you put in, but what you out into the hours that count. Learn to express rather than impress. Expressing evokes a me too attitude while impressing evokes a so what attitude.

Jim Rohn

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

Amelia Earhart

When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.

Karl Rahner

Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.

Woody Allen

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

Joyce Carol Oates

We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.

Sigmund Freud

When I was in high school, I don't know that I really had big dreams.

Alan Jackson