Will Overcome

Age and treachery will overcome youth and skill.

--Fausto Coppi

The Gap

I have often thought that in the gap between what we say and what we feel lies all human sadness.

--George Rodriguez

One Thing To Know

I suspect there's only one thing to know about that other world. You don't go to it when you're dead. That other world exists only when you're in this one.

--Joy Williams

Before We Know

Before we know the words for it, out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time its only measure.

--Tom Stoppard

Wouldn't I Be Getting Ready

My feeling is, if we gave up what we have committed to as our life's work, wouldn't I be getting ready to die?

--Elizabeth Edwards

Spiritual Death

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

A Period of Consequences

The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.

--Winston Churchill

You Can't

You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.

--Alan Greenspan

Original Sin

There is always that guilty knowledge of original sin in the back of all Americans' minds: the knowledge that we stole the land from the Native Americans and built it on the backs of African slaves.

--Mnemosyne

True Piety

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.

--George Santayana

Thin Thread

The world today hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.

--Carl G. Jung

Cheap and Dangerous

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

--George Bernard Shaw

Tubes

Try as we might, we'll never be fully comfortable soaring above the earth at hundreds of miles per hour in pressurized tubes.

--Patrick Smith

Mind and Spirit

Those who want the government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

--Harry S Truman

That's Funny

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."

--Isaac Asimov

Satisfied

For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.

--Niccolo Machiavelli

Special Form

Since sex is, after all, the most special form of human communication, and the technological society is built on expanding communication in much the way capitalism was built on the expansive properties of capital and money, the perspective is toward greater promiscuity.

--Norman Mailer

Puny Secrets

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

--Marshall McLuhan

Nobody Is Looking

Character is what you do when nobody is looking.

--Henry Huffman

Living Conditions

The living conditions of the poor must be improved if we really want to save our environment.

--Wangari Maathai