Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects.

Dave Barry

...for until that God who rules all the region of the sky...has freed you from the fetters of your body, you cannot gain admission here. Men were created with the understanding that they were to look after that sphere called Earth, which you see in the middle of the temple. Minds have been given to them out of the eternal fires you call fixed stars and planets, those spherical solids which, quickened with divine minds, journey through their circuits and orbits with amazing speed...

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Scipios D

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long.If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be ? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.

Christopher Hitchens

No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they?No. It's never like what you expected.Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?

Cormac McCarthy

If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer.

Victor Borge

My dreams are of water. And my nightmares.

Siouxsie Sioux

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

Thomas Szasz

Republicans have been losing the war of words for years now. Now they are just caving because they don't even want to try. I don't agree with that approach.

Herman Cain

He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

John Dryden

I like being in movies that have a great story. I'm not so interested in being a Hollywood star. It's a job, you know. When you wake up at six in the morning every day for a week, it feels like hard work.

Kristen Stewart

Perhaps it is weariness that causes seers not to act on what they see; for whereas the wisdom of the world can be vast, it includes the many futilities. Ideas do not have legs with which to run and hands with which to craft. They are wisps of smoke floating into a universe of pain and ignorance that overwhelm the capacity of one small human body and the mind trapped inside it.

Kate Horsley