Matt

“Eighty-five percent of recorded species live in the terrestrial realm, and the majority of these, some 850,000, are arthropods (that is, insects, spiders, and crustaceans). Most of the arthropod species are insects, and almost half of these are beetles, a fact that is said to have inspired a famous epigram from the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane. On being asked, one day, by some clerical gentlemen what his study of the natural world had revealed to him about God. Haldane is said to have replied that it indicated that He had "an inordinate fondness of beetles.”
― Richard E. Leakey, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind

“Instruments of coercion, once created, have a tendency to find their own natural masters.”
― George F. Kennan

“Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won.”
― Paul Celan

“In our country they do not permit any information to be X-rayed through and through, nor any discussion to encompass all the facets of a subject. All this is invariably suppressed at the very beginning, so no ray of light should fall on the naked body of truth. And then all this is piled up in one formless heap covering many years, where it languishes for whole decades, until all interest and all means of sorting out the rusty blocks from all this trash are lost.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn