"We confide in our strength, without boasting of it, we respect that of others, without fearing it."
— Thomas Jefferson

"It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
— Aristotle

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
— Abraham Lincoln

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
— Albert Einstein

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
— Mark Twain

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
— Albert Einstein

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."
— Albert Einstein

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
- speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776"
— Samuel Adams

""It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.""
— Samuel Adams

"History is the science of what never happens twice."
— Paul Valéry

"The past is always a rebuke to the present."
— Robert Penn Warren

"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past."
— Edward Gibbon

"Posterity -- you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. --John Quincy Adams"
— John Quincy Adams

"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."
— Albert Camus

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
French existentialist author & philosopher (1913 - 1960) "
— Albert Camus

"What is a rebel? A man who says no."
— Albert Camus

"I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically gettin killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions."
— Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

"
— Thomas Jefferson, 1802

"An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business."
— Henry David Thoreau

"In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress. "
— John Adams

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other."
— John Adams

"...probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone."
— John F. Kennedy

"Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital."
— Thomas Jefferson

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."
— Thomas Jefferson

"The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave. "
— Thomas Jefferson

"To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?"
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Dum Spiro, spero- As long as I breathe, I hope."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."
— Albert Camus

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
— Friedrich Nietzsche

"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."
— Elie Wiesel

"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. "
— Bertrand Russell

"Philosophy is common sense with big words."
— James Madison

"It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you."
— Bill Bryson

"I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything."
— Bill Bryson

"Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and the are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but - and here is the absolutely salient point - once would be enough."
— Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)

"I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored."
— Bill Bryson (The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America)

"My particular dread--the vivid possibility that left me staring at tree shadows on the bedroom ceiling night after night--was having to lie in a small tent, alone in an inky wilderness, listening to a foraging bear outside and wondering what its intentions were. I was especially riveted by an amateur photograph in Herrero's book, taken late at night by a camper with a flash at a campground out West. The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over a suspended food bag. The bears were clearly startled but not remotely alarmed by the flash. It was not the size or demeanor of the bears that troubled me--they looked almost comically nonaggressive, like four guys who had gotten a Frisbee caught up a tree--but their numbers. Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children's parties--I daresay it would even give a merry toot--and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag."
— Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)

"18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available."
— Bill Bryson

"When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one.""
— Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)