"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
— Isaac Asimov

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair"
— Terry Eagleton

"I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it."
— Mae West

"I wrote the story myself. It's about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it."
— Mae West

"I use to be Snow White, but I drifted."
— Mae West

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."
— Ambrose Bierce

"Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding."
— Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)

"Ocean: A body of water occupying two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills."
— Ambrose Bierce

"Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity."
— Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)

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

"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."
— Malcolm X

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
— Mark Twain

"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."
— Charles M. Schulz

"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"
— Henry Ward Beecher

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. "
— Isaac Asimov

"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."
— Isaac Asimov

"faith without doubt is addiction"
— Salman Rushdie

"'A poet's work...To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.'"
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. "
— Salman Rushdie

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
— Groucho Marx

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."
— Virginia Woolf

"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."
— Isaac Asimov

"They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions."
— Isaac Asimov (Pebble in the Sky)

"Write something, even if it's just a suicide note. "
— Gore Vidal

"The unfed mind devours itself."
— Gore Vidal

"The major problem- one of the major problems, for there are several- one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of whom manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 1)

"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear."
— Stephen King (Different Seasons)

"You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
— Ray Bradbury

"I hate writing, I love having written."
— Dorothy Parker

"Write drunk; edit sober."
— Ernest Hemingway

"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."
— Franz Kafka

"Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away."
— Dorothy Parker

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
— Franz Kafka

"I am free and that is why I am lost."
— Franz Kafka