And if you should be there and you see this beautiful cactus blossom painted silver by the moon and laughing up at the stars, this, Peekay, is heaven.

If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn't see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December 31st. The golden age of Greece, about 500 BC, would occur just thirty seconds before midnight.

Jerry A. Coyne

Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.

Russell Baker

A lesser complaint: hair extensions. There are moments on 'All My Children' when half the women actors, young and old, seem to be afflicted by android Barbie creep. All those thick swatches of lifeless strands clustering lankly round ladies' necks! Like orange tanning spray, this is a fashion fad that should be put out of its misery.

Camille Paglia

Our passion is our strength.

Billie Joe Armstrong

I have always had this view about the modern education system: we pay attention to brain development, but the development of warmheartedness we take for granted.

Dalai Lama

There are some things you only learn through experience.

Joe Namath

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Aristotle

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Harry S Truman

Loose tongues are worse than wicked hands.

Yiddish Proverb

Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.

Andrea Dworkin

Better speake truth rudely then lye covertly.

George Herbert

Offered a job as book critic for magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he'd replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he'd that job?

Christopher Hitchens