"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown"
— H.P. Lovecraft

"If you think about the unthinkable long enough it becomes quite reasonable."
— Josephine Tey

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

"If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long."
— Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

"When kids look up to great scientists the way they do to great musicians and actors, civilization will jump to the next level"
— Brian Greene

"An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind."
— Mahatma Gandhi (GANDHI: An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth)

"at the end of the game the team with the most points on the board is going to win."
— John Madden

"Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté."
— Margaret Atwood

"Do you realize how hard it is to keep your mind clear when somebody’s telling you to keep your mind clear?"
— Tom Upton (Just Plain Weird)

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."
— Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum)

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

"Discipline isn't about showing a dog who's boss; it's about taking
responsibility for a living creature you have brought into your world."
— Cesar Millan (Be the Pack Leader: Use CESAR'S WAY to Transform Your Dog . . . and Your Life)

"...I really should come with a warning label."
— Tom Upton (Just Plain Weird)

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."
— George Orwell

"I no longer drink nearly as much as I used to but, still, my motto is Sine coffea nihil sum. Without coffee, I'm nothing."
— Sarah Vowell

"The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. "
— Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer)