"I don't want realism.  I want magic... I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth!  And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!"
- Blanche DuBois -

"Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down."
- Ray Bradbury -

"Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking."
- J. C. Watts -

"You know, only dumb people try to impress smart people. Smart people just do what they do."
- Chris Rock -

"When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself."
- Jacques Cousteau -

"Everything but tradition is plagiarism."
- Salvador Dali -

"If it wasn't for disappointment, I wouldn't have any appointment."
- They Might be Giants -

"Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith."
- Paul Tillich -

"I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste."
- Marcel Duchamp -

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."
- Jack Kerouac (On the Road) -

"It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around."
- Stephen King -

"Nothing is written."
- Lawrence of Arabia -

"One of my goals is to be the most non-competitive woman in the world."
- Lotus Weinstock -

"Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly."
- Lotus Weinstock -

"It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to a craft rather than a career, to an idea rather than an institution. It's courageous, and requires a courage of the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill-equipped to perceive. They are so unequipped to perceive it that they can only call it childish, and so excuse their exploitation of you."
 - David Mamet on the nature of being an artist in our society -

"Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for the money."
- Moliere -

"If the murder of twelve innocent people can help save one human life, it will have been worth it."
-Dr. Necessiter from the Steve Martin comedy, "The Man with Two Brains" (1983)

"Language is never what it stands for. The word TREE will never bear fruit."
- Noah benShea -

"The medium is so miraculous that it should be on the side of the angels."
- Eleanor Perry -

"When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it, that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don't have to worry about making it. They can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it...when others make it after you."
- Picasso -

"When I am out of blue, I use red."
- Picasso -

"Tis true my form is something odd,
But blaming me is blaming God;
Could I create myself anew
I would not fail in pleasing you.
If I could reach from pole to pole
Or grasp the ocean with a span,
I would be measured by the soul;
The mind's the standard of the man."

A Poem by John Merrick
(AKA The Elephant Man)

"It often happens that I wake at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must talk to the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope."
- Pope John XXIII -

"If you copy from one author it's plagiarism.  If you copy from two, it's research."
- Wilson Mizner -

"I have been to reality, and they are not my people"
- Dan the Beachcomber -

"Rocks are smarter than cats because rocks have the sense to go away when you kick them."
 - Zenon Pylyshyn -

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission."
- Eleanor Roosevelt -

"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
- Carl Sagan -

"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult."
- Seneca - (BC 3-65 AD, Roman Philosopher, Dramatist, Statesman)

"The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people."
 - George Bernard Shaw -

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
 - George Bernard Shaw -

"Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus."
 --George Bernard Shaw--

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."
- George Bernard Shaw -

"Let's have no more curiosity about this bizarre cover-up."
-Principal Skinner-

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
- H.D. Thoreau -

"In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, DeVinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
- Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in "The Third Man" -

"What you're doing now matters much more than what you've done. Otherwise, you're dead but you still have to take showers."
Mel Sherer -

"I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves."
- August Strindberg -

"A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally."
- O. Wilde -

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
- A. Einstein -

"Life is beautiful, as long as it consumes you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is gorgeous, glorious. It's when you burn a slow fire and save fuel, that life's not worth having."
- D. H. Lawrence (A Modern Lover) -

"Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose."
- Winston Churchill (Election speech, Manchester, 1906) -

"My heart is as pure as the driven slush."
- Talulah Bankhead -

"Never express yourself more clearly than you think."
- Niels Bohr -

"Never let your morals keep you from doing what's right."
- Isaac Asimov -

"Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."
- Yogi Berra -

"Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held."
- Aldous Huxley -

"On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth."
- M. Kundera -

"One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important."
- Bertrand Russell -

"Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex."
- O. Wilde -

"Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it."
- Gordon R. Dickson -

"Technical skill is mastery of complexity while creativity is mastery of simplicity."
- E. Christopher Zeeman (Catastrophe Theory) -

"The fish will be the last to discover water."
- J. S. Bruner -

"The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first."
- Blaise Pascal -

"The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster."
- O. Wilde -

"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."
- George Orwell (Polemic, `Second thoughts on James Burnham') -

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- A. Einstein -

"To read too many books is harmful."
- Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (The New Yorker, 7 Mar 1977) -

"When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers."
- O. Wilde -

"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail."
- Abraham Maslow -

"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?"
- Ronald Reagan -

"Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do."
- O. Wilde -

"You can't have everything... where would you put it?"
- Steven Wright -

"You certainly look cool."
"Thanks, you don't look so hot yourself."
- Yogi Berrab -

"We should show life neither as it is nor as it ought to be, but as we see it in our dreams."
- Anton Chekhov (The Seagull, I) -

"A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth."
- Thomas Mann -

"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead."
- Aldous Huxley (Do What You Will) -

"Ever tried. Ever failed. Never mind. Try again. Fail better."
- Samuel Beckett -

"Human time does not turn in a circle, it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition."
- M. Kundera (The unbearable lightness of being VII, 4) -

"I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us."
- U. Eco (Foucault's Pendulum, VII) -

"I can resist everything except temptation."
- O. Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan, I) -

"I cannot do it without comp'ters."
- W. Shakespeare (Winter's Tale) -

"I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing."
- O. Wilde -

"I have nothing to say and I am saying it."
- John Cage -

"It's a scandal that all our government has done in the last 20 years is to try to find a pain killer that won't make you feel good."
- Timothy Leary -

"If at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking 'till you do succeed!"
- The Three Stooges' Curly from "Movie Maniacs" (1936) -

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 -

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country."
- President Theodore Roosevelt -

"Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country. Hold up your head. You have nothing to be ashamed of."
- Mark Twain -

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
- H.L. Mencken -

"Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent that the living beings inhabiting any other spot."
- Emma Goldman -

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable patriotism, how violently I hate all this."
- Albert Einstein -

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
- Krishnamurti -

"I had come to an entirely erroneous conclusion which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data."
- Arthur Conan Doyle -

"Plans seldom help, but planning always helps."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower -

"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."
- James Madison -

"You can trust the Americans to do the right thing, after they have tried every other alternative."
- Sir Winston Churchill -

"A friend traveling to NYC heard an aggressive driver's behavior described as 'So 9-10'."
- Rene Buchanan -

"Foot Heads Arms Body"
- Headline about leftwing MP Michael Foot leading a UK disarmament group -

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty"
 - Mahatma Ghandi -

"Titanic, Mask of Zorro, Godzilla, Independence Day, BEAN, the Man in the Iron Mask, Jurassic Park, The Jackal, The Mummy and My Best Friend's Wedding"
 - Top 10 Grossing Films in the Middle East over the last 15 years: Phil's Phunny Phacts -

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight - nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety - is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions and blood of better men than himself."
- John Stuart Mill -

"Go to Disney World."
- George W. Bush (spokesmodel) -

"The government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian Religion."
- President George Washington -

"I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature."
- President Thomas Jefferson -

"The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my religion."
- President Abraham Lincoln -

"A just government has no need for the clergy or the church."
- President James Madison -

"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."
- Thomas Edison -

"I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end... where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice."
- President John F. Kennedy -

"The United States is a Christian nation founded upon Christian principles and beliefs."
- President George W. Bush -

"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means."
- George Bernard Shaw -

"He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason."
- Cicero -

"Let the terrorists among us be warned: If you overstay your visa - even by one day - we will arrest you. If you violate a local law, you will be put in jail and kept in custody as long as possible. We will use every available statute. We will seek every prosecutorial advantage. We will use all our weapons within the law and under the Constitution to protect life and enhance security for America."
- Attorney General "Hardass" Ashcroft

"My importance to the world is relatively small. On the other hand, my importance to myself is tremendous. I am all I have to work with, to play with, to suffer and to enjoy. It is not the eyes of others that I am wary of, but my own. I do not intend to let myself down more than I can possibly help, and I find that the fewer illusions I have about myself or the world around me, the better company I am for myself."
- Noel Coward -

"By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."
- Socrates -

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are."
- H.L. Mencken from Smart Set magazine, December 1919 -

"Democracy is the belief that twenty thousand lemmings can't all be wrong."
- Unknown -

"Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish."
- Unknown -

 "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
- Albert Einstein -

"The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so, cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are both able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can, but will not, than they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, then they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, how does it exist?"
- Epicures, 300 B.C. -

"If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing"
- Anatole France -

"Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes -

"There is no sin but ignorance."
- Christopher Marlowe -

"The trouble with democracy is the democrats and the trouble with Islam is the Muslims."
- Michael Dare -

"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death...Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
- Bertrand Russell -

"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them."
- Mark Twain -

"We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things and yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy for us."
- Mark Twain -

"Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel."
- Horace Walpole -

"What luck for rulers, that men do not think."
-Adolph Hitler -

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas -

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced."
- Albert Einstein -

"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own."
- Thomas Jefferson -

"If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable."
- John F. Kennedy -

"For every complex problem there is an easy answer, and it is wrong."
- H.L. Mencken -

"Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties."
- Abraham Lincoln -

"Mistrust those in whom the impulse to punish is strong."
-Friedrich Nietzsche -

"No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."
- P. J. O'Rourke -

"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men."
- Abraham Lincoln -

"Let the people know the truth and the country is safe."
- Abraham Lincoln -

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
- Thomas Jefferson -

"Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat-to advance."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt -

"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."
- Thomas Jefferson -

"No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent."
- Abraham Lincoln -

"We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions-bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one nationality against another, seeks to degrade all nationalities."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt -

"Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth."
- George Orwell, 1984 -

"The passing of an unjust law is the suicide of authority."
- Pastoral Letter of the American Roman Catholic Herarchy, Feb. 1920 -

"There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action."
- Bertrand Russell: Outline of Intellectual Rubbish -

"While democracy must have its organizations and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty."
- Charles Evans Hughes: U.S. Supreme Court Member, May 1908 -

"Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance."
- Woodrow Wilson: Address, New York Press Club, May 9, 1912 -

"Propaganda must not serve the truth, especially as it might bring out something favorable for the opponent."
- Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf -

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
- Martin Luther King, Jr. -

"There is no need for propaganda to be rich in intellectual content."
- P.J. Goebbels: Speech at Nuremberg, Aug. 20, 1926 -

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it."
- Thomas Jefferson -

"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under
a just God, cannot long retain it."
- Abraham Lincoln -

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you
please."
- Mark Twain -

"I don't know why I did it, I don't know why I enjoyed it, and I don't know why I'll do it again."
- Bart Simpson -

"Scriptures; noun. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based."
- Ambrose Bierce in The Devil's Dictionary -

"When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite."
- William Blake -

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
- Charles Bukowski -

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick

"Faith is often the boast of the man who is too lazy to investigate."
- F.M. Knowles -

"I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education."
- Wilson Mizner -

"I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time."
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche -

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing, all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."
- Gene Roddenberry -

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. -

"When it comes to a choice between two evils, I always choose the one I haven't tried before."
- Mae West -

"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."
- Oscar Wilde -

"If you want to make enemies, try to change something."
- President Woodrow Wilson -

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
- Hunter S. Thompson -

"Other men's sins are before our eyes; our own are behind our backs."
- Seneca -

"This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, not tolerate error as long as reason is left free to combat it."
- Thomas Jefferson -

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
- Thomas Jefferson -

"Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered."
- Cicero -

"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder."
- George Washington -