The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.

Oscar Wilde

Our dog died from licking our wedding picture.

Phyllis Diller

Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them, and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men, than men upon governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad; if it be ill, they will cure it. But if men be bad, let the government be never so good, they will endeavour to warp and spoil it to their turn.

William Penn

If a man is dumb, someone is going to get the best of him, so why not you? If you don't, you're as dumb as he is.

Arnold Rothstein

Someone receives a promotion, gets an important assignment, makes a major discovery, or moves into the president's office. He's lucky, an envious person remarks. He gets the breaks; they're always in his favor. In reality, luck or the breaks of life had little or nothing to do with it. So-called luck usually is found at the exact point where preparation meets opportunity. For a time, an individual may get ahead by pull, but eventually someone with push will displace him. Success is not due to a fortuitous concourse of stars at our birth, but to a steady trail of sparks from the grindstone of hard work each day.

Kenneth Hildebrand

You could know a man not by what his friends said about him, but by how he treated his servants.

Cassandra Clare

All of science to me, everything that we have learned, is important to the extent that it brings us to our senses.

Ann Druyan

My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that.

Freeman A. Hrabowski III

Men and women are made for each other, but their mutual dependence differs in degrees; man is dependent on woman through his desires; woman is dependent on man through her desires and also through her needs; he could do without her better than she can do without him. She cannot fulfill her purpose in life without his aid, without his goodwill, without his respect.....Nature herself has decreed that woman, both for herself and her children, should be at the mercy of man s judgment.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

Honore de Balzac

I wanted the feel in these books to be like an epic fantasy, with kings, queens, dukes and court politics, but of course like what I was explaining before, about making the science make sense, you have to make the politics make sense, too.

Kevin J. Anderson

Stop being a victim of your own circumstances

Steve Maraboli