For whatever reason, I didn't succumb to the stereotype that science wasn't for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.

Oliver Sacks

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

Alice Walker, The Color Purple,

Think of what happened after 9/11, the minute before there was any assessment, there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq, and so the war drums beat.

Ron Paul

Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.

Ray Bradbury

Nothing makes you more tolerant of a neighbor's noisy party than being there.

Franklin P. Jones

The beauty and completeness of a wild apple tree living its own life in the woods is heartily acknowledged by all those who have been so happy as to form its acquaintance. The fine wild piquancy of its fruit is unrivaled, but in the great question of quantity as human food wild apples are found wanting. Man, therefore, takes the tree from the woods, manures and prunes and grafts,plans and guesses, adds a little of this and that, selects and rejects, until apples of every conceivable size and softness are produced, like nut galls in response to the irritating punctures of insects. Orchard apples are to me the most eloquent words that culture had ever spoken, but they reflect no imperfection upon Nature's spicy crab.

John Muir, Steep Trails, page 15

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

George Bernard Shaw

Finding good players is easy. Getting them to play as a team is another story.

Casey Stengel

The ugliness at the heart of beauty. Is there always ugliness, do you suppose? Even when the object is very, very beautiful?

Mary Balogh

Next comes the realist phase (After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.).

Terry Pratchett

We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read.

Abraham Lincoln

A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.

Andrea Dworkin