"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me...only he's an imbecile."
— Spider Robinson (Off the Wall at Callahan's)

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley (The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley)

"Welcome to Hell. Here's your accordion."
— Gary Larson (The Complete Far Side 1980-1994)

"The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools."
— Larry Niven (Ringworld)

"I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me."
— Matt Groening

"Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols ... Art tells gorgeous lies that come true."
— Hakim Bey (T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone)

"Those who make us believe that anything’s possible and fire our imagination over the long haul, are often the ones who have survived the bleakest of circumstances. The men and women who have every reason to despair, but don’t, may have the most to teach us, not only about how to hold true to our beliefs, but about how such a life can bring about seemingly impossible social change. "
— Paul Rogat Loeb (The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear)

"Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."
— George Macaulay Trevelyan

"Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe. "
— Arundhati Roy (Public Power in the Age of Empire)

"Mr. Rearden," said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, "if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders-what would you tell him to do?"
"I . . . don't know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell him?"
"To shrug."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud."
— Rosa Luxemburg

"The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire."
— Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point)

"لا يوجد في الدنيا غرباء .. وإنما أصدقاء لم يتعارفوا بعد"
— انيس منصور

"We Greeks believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing"
— Thucydides

"Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream."
— Iris Murdoch

""Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.""
— Neil Postman

"“All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95 percent of Americans are “scientifically illiterate.” That’s just the same fraction as those African Americans, almost all of them slaves, who were illiterate just before the Civil War—when severe penalties were in force for anyone who taught a slave to read. Of course there’s a degree of arbitrariness about any determination of illiteracy, whether it applies to language or to science. But anything like 95 percent illiteracy is extremely serious.”

"
— Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)

"I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is that they must change if they are to get better. "
— Georg Lichtenberg

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Every way of life produces its own environment and in turn is influenced by that environment."
— Hugh Nibley

"Indeed, bribery, favoritism, and corruption in a great variety of forms were rampant not only in politics, but in all levels of society."
— David McCullough (1776)

"When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable--and therefore not significant."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"touch a pregnant bitch and make her give birth to a dead child"
— Immortal Technique

"Earthmen may even rule at Trantor for a generation, but their children will become Trantorians, and in their turn will look down upon the remnant on Earth."
— Isaac Asimov (Pebble in the Sky)

"When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.

"
— Kikuyu Proverb

"..the happy hum of humanity."
— Arthur C. Clarke

"Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times, just as she was cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness."
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

"Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
— Guy Billout

"Der Teufel ist ein Optimist, wenn er meint er könnte den Menschen schlechter machen."
— Karl Kraus

"Create the change you seek in the world.
Be an ecopreneur.
Launch your dream green business."
— John D. Ivanko

"Notre objectif final est de faire entrer l'étude du comportement humain dans le cadre des sciences physiques."
— Lord Adrian

"Conformity is contagious."
— Isman H. Suryaman

"An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment. "
— Anthony Standen