Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

I looked out my apartment window, and I saw a bird wearingsneakers and a button saying, I ain't flying no where. Isaid, What's your problem buddy? He said, I'm sick of thisstuff winter here, summer there, winter here, summer there.I don't know who thought this stuff up, but it certainly wasn'ta bird. I said, Well, I was just making breakfast, come onin. Want some eggs? Sorry.

Steven Wright

I started eating healthier. I actually gave up fast food. I gave up candy and potato chips and everything else. I started watching what I ate.

Ryan Lochte

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Ch

A Foreign Secretaryand this applies also to a prospective Foreign Secretaryis always faced with this cruel dilemma. Nothing he can say can do very much good, and almost anything he may say may do a great deal of harm. Anything he says that is not obvious is dangerous; whatever is not trite is risky. He is forever poised between the cliche and the indiscretion.

Harold MacMillan

The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard

If you see a black family, it's looting, but if it's a white family they are looking for food.

Kanye West

God is subtle, but he is not malicious.

Albert Einstein

Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity.

Eric S. Raymond

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

John Burroughs

The other major issue you have no doubt heard about the decision to build a fence between Israel and the palestinians. There is no doubt in my mind that a fence will be built, political pressure are too heavy to resist. There is also no doubt that it will be ineffectual. Every day thousands of Palestinians enter Israel illegally. The vast majority seek work. The tide of humanity will overwhelm the fence and its guardians. Terrorists will follow in their path.

Elan Pavlov

For real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world. We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men.

Isabel Allende

I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can't get rid of.

Calvin Trillin