At the rate science proceeds, rockets and missiles will one day seem like buffalo -- slow, endangered grazers in the black pasture of outer space.

Behind him lay the gray Azores, Behind the gates of Hercules;Before him not the ghost of shores,Before him only shorless seas.The good Mate said, Now we must pray,For lo! the very stars are gone.Brave Admiral, speak, what shall I say?Why say, 'Sail on! sail on! and on!My men grow mutinous day by day;My men grow ghastly wan and weak!The stout Mate thought of home; a sprayOf salt wavewashed his swarthy cheek.What shall I say, brave Admiral, say,If we sight naught but seas at dawn?Why, you shall say at break of day,'Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!'They sailed. They sailed. Then spake the Mate;This mad sea shows its teeth tonight.He curls his lip, he lies in wait,With lifted teeth, as if to bite!Brave Admiral, say but one good word;What shall we do when hope is gone?The words leapt like a leaping sword;Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!Then, pale and worn, he kept his deckAnd peered through darkness. Ah! that nightOf all dark nights! And then a speck --A light! A light! A light! A light!It grew, a starlit flag unfurled!It grew to be Time's burst of dawn.He gained a world; he gave that worldIts greatest lesson: On! sail on!based on the courageous determination of Christopher Columbus

Joaquin Miller

There are three things that can destroy a preacher, the glory, the gold, and the girls.

Proverb

An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

Voltaire

So justice while she winks at crimes,Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

Samuel Butler (poet), Hudibras (

Sometimes I have a notion that what might improve the situation is to have women take over the occupations of government and trade and to give men their freedom. Let them do what they are best at. While we scrawl interoffice memos and direct national or extranational affairs, men could spend all their time inventing wheels, peering at stars, composing poems, carving statues, exploring continents -- discovering, reforming, or crying out in a sacramental wilderness. Efficiency would probably increase, and no one would have to worry so much about the Gaza Strip or an election.

Phyllis McGinley

I always have to dream up there against the stars. If I don't dream I will make it, I won't even get close.

Henry J. Kaiser

As so many commitments demand your timeOr your shut-eye important be,Your attraction to me must in some way lack,Such a pity to spend time on thee.

Charlotte M. Liebel

The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Virginia Woolf

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

Albert J. Nock

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

Joan Didion

Fun can be the dessert of our lives but never its main course.

Rabbi Harold S. Kushner

Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, bur raise it to that standard. That great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson