"Ignorance killed the cat, sir. Curiosity was framed."
C.J. Cherryh

"All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual."
Honore de Balzac

"Change and Growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life."
Herbert Otto

"To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium."
Eric Hoffer

"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
Emerson

"Ideas in the mind are the transcript of the world; words are the transcript of ideas; and writing and printing are the transcript of words."
Addison

"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."
Akiro Kurosawa

"Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness."
Pascal

"As plants are suffocated and drowned with too much moisture, and lamps with too much oil, so is the active part of the understanding with too much study."
Montaigne

"Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike."
Plato

"Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?"
C. D. Tavares

"...The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind."
Martin Luther King Jr.

"Hatreds are the cinders of affection."
Walter Raleigh

"Words without actions are the assassins of idealism."
Herbert Hoover

"Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
Albert Camus

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
Oscar Wilde

"Those who wouldst soar above the level plain of tradition must have strong wings ... it is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth."
Kate Chopin

"The shortness of life, the dullness of the senses, the numbness of indifference and unprofitable occupations allow us to know but very little. And again and again swift oblivion, the embezzler of knowledge and the enemy of memory, shakes out of the mind, in the course of time, even what we knew."
Thomas Aquinas

"The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land."
T.H. Huxley

"Remember, Information is not knowledge; Knowledge is not wisdom; Wisdom is not truth; Truth is not beauty; Beauty is not love; Love is not music; Music is the best."
Frank Zappa

"Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent."
Victor Hugo

"One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude."
Carl Sandburg

"All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by surplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships."
George Bernard Shaw

"Nothing is more bitter than to know you could have had Eden, but turned it into Hiroshima."
Nancy Kress, on the use of technology

"[All people are] entranced from birth into a collective nightmare of separate individuals struggling in an alien universe for survival, satisfaction, and significance."
John Wren-Lewis

"To study religion is to facilitate a broader understanding of human history and a deeper understanding of human life. The appropriate context for the study of religion is that of "critical empathy": neither seeking to destroy nor promote, but rather to describe, analyse and evaluate and, hopefully, arrive at a position of informed understanding."
Waikato University Religion department

"Religion is Opium for the masses."
Karl Marx

"Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable."
Ambrose Bierce

"I do not consider it a sign of divine love to consign to hell people who live good lives but make an honest mistake in belief."
Moshe Shulman

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
Galileo Galilei

"The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and generosity."
Abraham Lincoln

"Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme which we cannot escape."
Nietzsche

"Memory isn't like reading a book: it's more like writing a book from fragmentary notes."
John F. Kihlstrom

"Idealist: a cynic in the making."
Irving Layton

"One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this."
The Impossible Dream

"We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian."
Lionel Trilling

"Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it... It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more."
Erica Jong

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has a genius, power, magic in it."
Goethe

"Ah, you seek meaning." "Yes." "Then listen to the music, not the song."