"I wish I had more friends, but people are such jerks. If you can just get most people to leave you alone, you're doing good. If you can find even one person you really like, you're lucky. And if that person can also stand you, you're really lucky."
— Bill Watterson (The Complete Calvin and Hobbes)

"Hello Dad! It is now three in the morning. Do you know where I am? "
— Bill Watterson (The Essential Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept."
— Bill Watterson

"I go to school, but I never learn what I want to know."
— Bill Watterson (The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes)

"Happiness is being famous for your financial ability to indulge in every kind of excess."
— Bill Watterson (The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes)

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts."
— Bertrand Russell

"Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own. "
— Bertrand Russell (What I Believe)

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education."
— Bertrand Russell

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways."
— Bertrand Russell

"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."
— Christopher Hitchens

"The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more."
— Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-believer)

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
— Carl Sagan

"It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese."
— Carl Sagan

"I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way."
— Carl Sagan

"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent. "
— Carl Sagan

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patters that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
— Cormac McCarthy

"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
— Carl Sagan

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

". . . I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves."
— Carl Sagan

"Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path. "
— Carl Sagan

"The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff."
— Carl Sagan