"He seemed like a child lost among adults or an adult lost among children or an animal lost in a herd of animals of a different species."
— Javier Cercas

"So Geographers in Afric-maps
With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps;
And o'er uninhabitable Downs
Place Elephants for want of Towns"
— Jonathan Swift

"In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides."
— Heinrich Heine

"I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are."
— Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass)

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

"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay."
— Christopher Hitchens

"Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and --since there is no other metaphor--also the soul.
"
— Christopher Hitchens

"A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Not to know what happened before you were born is to be forever a child"
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others...And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?"
— Roberto Bolaño

"Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions."
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
— Richard Dawkins

"Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation"
— Edward R. Murrow

"History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't."
— Jules Renard

"Many go out for wool, and come home shorn themselves."
— Cervantes

"Anything too stupid to be said is sung. "
— Voltaire

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
— Voltaire

"A witty saying proves nothing. "
— Voltaire

"It's like gazing through a horrid little window into an awesome universe of pure blockheaded spite. Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo."
— Charlie Brooker on the Daily Mail