"The lesson of history is that we don't learn the lessons of history."
— Thomas G. Donlan

"....young people unskilled in mathematics, addled by credit cards, and weaned on so-called intelligent design...will somehow retool American science for another generation of world industrial leadership."
— Kevin Phillips

"Because I am an inhuman monster, I tend to be logical,..."
— Jeff Lindsay

"Science isn't just about blowing things up. Rather it's about blowing things up and knowing how you did it."
— William Gurstelle

"...every new genetically engineered plant is a unique event in nature, bringing its own set of genetic contingencies. This means that the reliability or safety of one genetically modified plant doesn't necessarily guarantee the reliability or safety of the next."
— Michael Pollan

"You are what what you eat eats."
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names."
— Jodi Picoult

"There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him - disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor."
— Neal Stephenson (Anathem)

"Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It's one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they're the four hugest words in the world when they're put together.

You can do it."
— Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian)

"The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark."
— John Muir

"All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause – there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once...Even just learning enough about a subject so you can speak against an opponent eloquently makes you an unusual personage. Start with that. Any one of you would have cried out, would have intervened, had you been in that crowd in Bashiqa. Well thanks to digital technology, you’re all in it now."
— Joss Whedon

"People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy."
— Joss Whedon

"When it comes down to it, I don't have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is:
Read to children.
Vote.

And never buy anything from a man who's selling fear.
"
— Dreamers of the Day, Maria Doria Russell

"Interviewer: Have you ever considered writing nonfiction?
Mary Doria Russell: Oh, honey, I did! Let's see...There was "A Reconsideration of the Evidence for Cannibalism at the Krapina Neandertal Site." That was a big hit. And who could ever forget "Cutmarks on the Engis II Calvarium"? Then there was "Browridge Development as a Function of Bending Stress in the Supraorbital Region." I got tons of reprint requests for that one.

Trust me fiction is better."
— Mary Doria Russell

"In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face."
— Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)

"We must respect the other fellow's religion but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
— H.L. Mencken

"You sure got a lot of questions in the world, without exactly getting the same number of answers."
— Guy Gavrial Kay

"Well, the Holocaust didn't start with the Germans picking up Jews and sending them to concentration camps and putting them in gas chambers. The Holocaust started in the hearts of the people. As soon as you go and say, "That Jew!" or whatever, that's where it starts, you know. That was the beginning. As soon as you put one race higher than another one, you get that."
— Arie van Mansum

"Far below, making their way through the swinging glass doors, a retinue of Buddhist monks entered the Shopping Center. They approached in single file, heads shaven, their robes flowing behind them like a flood of freshly squeezed Florida orange juice.

The crowd melted, parting like a biblical sea to allow them through. The guard abashedly lowered his nightstick and stepped hastily aside. And the monks, without pause or ceremony, simply mounted the escalator and rode it to the next level.
"
— Jeff Greenwald (Shopping for Buddhas)

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."
— Albert Einstein

"Let no one destitute of Geometry enter my doors."
— Plato

"I thought of all the magazine article I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, 'See how lucky you are?' But it had been gnawing at the inside, that part that didn't fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?"
— Jodi Picoult

"There is a largeness about mathematics that transcends race and time; mathematics may humbly help in the market-place, but it also reaches to the stars."
— Robert Turnbull

"The greatest mathematics has the simplicity and inevitableness of supreme poetry and music, standing on the borderland of all that is wonderful in Science, and all that is beautiful in Art."
— Robert Turnbull

"There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science."
— Gauss

"The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish."
— Alfred North Whitehead

"Eventually, a bad thing happened, as they do to more girls than you'd like to imagine. The bad thing happened on a weekend camping trip;...She's never told anyone what happened, so I won't tell you either. It's what you're imagining anyway."
— Sera Gamble

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
— Carl Sagan

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe."
— Carl Sagan

"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. "
— Carl Sagan

"And I'll dance with you in Vienna,
I'll be wearing a river's disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.

 "Take This Waltz", a
 translation by Leonard Cohen of
 the poem "Little Viennese Waltz"
 by Federico García Lorca.
"
— Leonard Cohen (Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs)

"Don't call yourself a secret
unless you mean to keep it."
— Leonard Cohen (Selected Poems 1956-1968)

"Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love "
— Leonard Cohen

"I have often prayed for you
like this
Let me have her"
— Leonard Cohen

"first of all nothing will happen
and a little later
nothing will happen again"
— Leonard Cohen (Book of Longing)

"It's hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender"
— Leonard Cohen- The stranger song

"If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad."
— George Gordon Byron

"The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree
I planted; they have torn me, and I bleed.
I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed."
— George Gordon Byron

"Let us read and let us dance — two amusements that will never do any harm to the world."
— Voltaire

"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they're not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or--such is the pleasure they experience--they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"Dance like it hurts. Love like you need money. Work when people are watching. -- Dogbert's Motto "
— Scott Adams

"Unusual travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion."
— Jon Stewart

"Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake."
— Jon Stewart

"If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies."
— Jon Stewart

"So, is there hope for a truly democratic Africa? Long answer: Only if continent-wide improvements in education, human rights and public health are coupled with an aggressive and far-sighted debt-relief program that breaks the cycle of subsistence farming and urban squalor. Short answer: No."
— Jon Stewart (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America)