In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.

Don't you see what's at stake here? The ultimate aim of all science to penetrate the unknown. Do you realize we know less about the earth we live on than about the stars and the galaxies of outer space? The greatest mystery is right here, right under our feet.

Walter Reisch

Life is really simple, but men insist on making it complicated.

Confucius

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Aristotle

I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.

Victor Hugo

To walk because it is good for you warps the sould, just as it warps the soul for a man to talk for hire or because he think it his duty.

Hilaire Belloc, The Footpath Way

Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To find fault with biological design - as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does - because it misses some idealized optimum is therefore gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether the designer has proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives.

William A. Dembski

The waste basket is a writer's best friend.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

Gustave Flaubert

The only difference between a good shot and a bad shot is if it goes in or not.

Charles Barkley

Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must.

Neil Gaiman

I am tortured when I am away from my family, from my children. I am horribly guilt-ridden.

Jessica Lange

A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.

Frederik Pohl