"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)

"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)

"And pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked."
— Jane Austen

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

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

"A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself."
— Arthur Miller

"The single best thing about coming out of the closet is that nobody can insult you by telling you what you've just told them. "
— Rachel Maddow

"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

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

"America isn't a country; it's a marketplace. The more you sell, the more at home you'll feel."
— Iimani David

"Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences."
— Thomas Mann (Death in Venice)

"Oh, thou demon Drink, thou fell destroyer; Thou curse of society, and its greatest annoyer. What hast thou done to society, let me think? I answer thou hast caused the most of ills, thou demon Drink."
— William McGonagall