Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.

Experience (has) long taught me the reasonableness of mutual sacrifices of opinion among those who are to act together for any common object, and the expediency of doing what good we can when we cannot do all we would wish

Thomas Jefferson

Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

Peter De Vries

I was looking for something a lot heavier, yet melodic at the same time. Something different from heavy metal, a different attitude.

Kurt Cobain

Some people are willing to pay the price and it's the same with staying healthy or eating healthy. There's some discipline involved. There's some sacrifices.

Mike Ditka

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.

Marquis de Sade

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps twenty players, and Tennessee Williams has about five, and Samuel Beckett one - and maybe a clone of that one. I have ten or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Gore Vidal

Religion fails if it cannot speak to men as they are.

William Barclay

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

Ambrose Bierce

The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.

Jeremy Rifkin

Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree. Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills, The delight of her husbands, her aunts, an infant of three, And of medicos marveling sweetly on her ills.

John Crowe Ransom

Writing is total grunt work. A lot of people think it's all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don't buy that. It's a job. There are days when I really want to write, days when I don't. Every day I sit down and write.

Jodi Picoult

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.

William Osler