Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

I think I have an inner confidence that my tastes are pretty simple, that what I find funny finds a wide audience. I'm not particularly intellectual or clever or minority-focused in my creative instincts. And I'm certainly not aware of suppressing more sophisticated ambitions.

Rowan Atkinson

It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general. The farmer philosophizes in terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes his experiences of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it must be by an equally virile productivity.

Charles Horton Cooley

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

Alan Watts

Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.

E.M. Forster

In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.

Nancy BanksSmith

The life of an aviator seemed to me ideal. It involved skill. It brought adventure. It made use of the latest developments of science. Mechanical engineers were fettered to factories and drafting boards while pilots have the freedom of wind with the expanse of sky. There were times in an aeroplane when it seemed I had escaped mortality to look down on earth like a God.

Charles A. Lindbergh, 1927

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

Johann von Goethe

He took a hairpin out of my untidy hair (by now my complicated arrangement of ringlets must have looked as if a couple of birds had been nesting there); he took a strand of it and wound it around his finger. With his other hand he began stroking my face, and then he bent down and kissed me again, this time very cautiously. I closed my eyes - and the same thing happened as before: my brain suffered that delicious break in transmission.

Kerstin Gier

The real test of friendship is: can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?

Eugene Kennedy

The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us.

Albert Camus

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

Simone Weil, Waiting for God

Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe