Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

Will Durant

Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.

Charles Horton Cooley

I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.

Rita Rudner

Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.

Jesse James Garrett

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

Janet Burroway

No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.

Henry A. Kissinger

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

Wislawa Szymborska

The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. 'Special' and 'limited' are important words in the last sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gen

I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave - thank God for the quiet grave

John Keats, letter from Joseph S

Recommend to your children virtue that alone can make them happy, not gold.

Ludwig van Beethoven

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

Barbara Tuchman

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.

Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense