Ethical Infants

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
--General Omar N. Bradley

Personal

When people say, "It's business, it's not personal," that just means it's not personal for them. It can be personal for me.
--R.A. Dickey

Privacy

Privacy is delayed gratification.
--Alessandro Acquisti

Laugh

Precious few of our religious leaders laugh. They shout. God is not an exclamation point, though.
--Eric Weiner

Perfect

We all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits. Indeed we seem to have no other criterion of truth and reason than the type and kind of opinions and customs current in the land where we live. There we always see the perfect religion, the perfect political system, the perfect and most accomplished way of doing everything.
--Michel de Montaigne

Fashion

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
--Larry Ellison (chairman, Oracle)

Poetry

Prose is a house, poetry a man in flames running quite fast through it.
--Anne Carson

Beautiful

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
--Alain de Botton

Heroism

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.
--Arthur Ashe

Manners

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners, I don’t like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings.
—William Faulkner (The Big Sleep, spoken by Philip Marlowe/Humphrey Bogart)

Pretext

Much of the world's elite understand exactly what they're doing: i.e., use the economic catastrophe they themselves created as a pretext to kill the welfare state they've despised for 65 years. Nonetheless, a significant chunk of them actually believe they're doing the right thing for everyone.
--Jonathan Schwarz

Horror

We humans can't truly embrace every horror, or else we'd be submerged in a nanosecond by the unspeakable suffering that this world offers.
--Laura Pritchett

Invisible

Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.
--George Carlin

New Technologies

The impact of new technologies is invariably misjudged because we measure the future with yardsticks from the past.
--Stephen Baker

Decently

What makes life worth living are the saints. They can be longtime friends or someone I meet on a street. They find a way to behave decently in an indecent society.
--Kurt Vonnegut

Information

Neither information nor a drug fix ever gives any happiness when you have it, but will make you miserable when you don't.
--Michel Serres

Enthusiasm

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.
--Benjamin Disraeli

At Heart

Because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
--Anne Frank

Written Inside

The elements that compose us are derived from the birth of stars and the explosion of supernovae. These events are only the beginning of our deep connections to the universe. Written inside of us is the birth of the solar system and workings of the planet itself.
--Neil Shubin

Standard

If you get nothing else out of this, just remember one thing: There is nothing "standard." Everything is negotiable. If they tell you it's not, go find somebody else.
--Stanley Snadowsky

Believe

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
--Isaac Asimov

Its Time

You can't pull a butterfly out of its cocoon; it has to be its time.
--Dr. John Woodall

Work

Even when I do not feel like work, I sit down to it just the same. I cannot wait for inspiration.
--Igor Stravinsky

Copyright

A keen sense of copyright is my nearest approach to an emotion.
--Edith Wharton

Economy

Something has gone terribly wrong when the biggest threat to our American economy is the American Congress.
--Senator Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.)

Secret

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.
--James Taylor

Desire

What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?
--Alan Watts

Examples

I am forever monitoring myself for traces of folly, insensitivity, arrogance, false humility, cruelty, stupidity, immaturity and, guess what, I keep finding examples.
--Phillip Lopate

Thought

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.
--C.S. Lewis

Hours

The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.
--William Blake

The Internet

Lonely people have a natural affinity for the Internet. It's always there waiting, patient, flexible, suitable for every mood.
--Roger Ebert

Medium

The medium is the message.
--Marshall McLuhan

The medium is the metaphor.
--Neil Postman

The dominant medium of every age defines the way humans expect the world to be.
--Scott Johnson

Reality

In any relationship, there is one inescapable reality: To love anything is to risk loss.
--Suzanne Clothier

Quiet

The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration--it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.
--Tim Kreider

Two Kinds

Among highly intelligent people, there are two kinds of minds, the sharp and the soft. We expect smart people to have minds like swords, made to fight and slash and slay. Soft smart minds, though, are of another, rarer kind. They absorb great quantities of data and opinion, often silently, even sluggishly, and turn them around slowly until a solution appears. Darwin is probably the best instance of the soft style in science history.
--Adam Gopnick

Dark Side

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
--Mark Twain

Reality

Anyone who thinks that there is not a dramatic change in weather patterns is denying reality. We have a new reality, and old infrastructures and old systems.
--Governor Andrew Cuomo

Enjoy

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
--Bertrand Russell

Things

I've simply concluded that we've lost our minds. There is no other way to explain what we, as a civilization (word used in the descriptive sense only), are doing to ourselves. We've become so enamored with our brain's capacity for creating things, that we've given it over totally to do nothing else--to our own demise. So smitten with ourselves, to the point of intoxication.
--Ivermarkt Pasadena

Plausible

Religious supernatural beliefs are irrational, but emotionally plausible and satisfying. That's why they're so believable, despite at the same time being rationally implausible.
--Jared Diamond

Hard Choices

If it's a hard decision, then there's always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good in its way. Hard choices are always unimportant.
--Albert Bregman

Capitalism

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
--Bertrand Russell

Tolerant

Don't be so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.
--Basil Baker

Sharing

Life is all about sharing moments with those you love. That sharing can involve being in the moment together. But quite often, it's about recounting it after the fact.
--Ryan McGee

Government

To say government must be small is nonsense. Government must be the size necessary to make a society and economy work, and that is not fixed--nor could it possibly have been known by farmers in the late 1700s.
--Jeff Madrick

Is

Love is or it ain't.
--Toni Morrison

Employees

Happy employees make good products.
--Chris King

Tenderness

You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know.
--Allan Gurganus

Free

The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.
--Thomas Merton

Change

Governments care only as much as their citizens force them to care. Nothing changes unless we change.
--George Monbiot

Lukewarm

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Beginning

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.
--Charles Darwin

Second Amendment

There are three honest interpretations of the Second Amendment, which makes no mention of guns or self-defense:
1. Private citizens can own the types of arms known to the writers of the Constitution in 1790, mostly slow-to-load muskets.
2. Private citizens can own any type of arm, including nuclear arms.
3. Government can make reasonable restrictions on what arms private citizens can own.
--RD

Civilized

I am civilized. My feelings are not.
--Jeanette Winterson

Chance

Perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.
--Colum McCann

Once Were

What is it, he wonders,
that we had then and don't have now,
that we once were and are no longer.
--Jack Gilbert

Knowledge, Wisdom

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not using it in a fruit salad.
--Brian O'Driscoll

Prestige

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.
--Paul Graham

Guilty

Our leaders now treat climate change as a guilty secret.
--George Monbiot

Work, Play

Most people have the ridiculous notion that anything they do which produces an income is work--and that anything they do outside "working" hours is play. There is no logic to that.
--William J. Reilly

Specific Person

Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self's own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
--Jonathan Franzen

A Part

I am a part of all that I have met.
--Alfred Lord Tennyson

Everything Changes

Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.
--Shunryu Suzuki

New Year

It's a New Year and with it comes a fresh opportunity to shape our world. So this is my wish, a wish for me as much as it is a wish for you: in the world to come, let us be brave--let us walk into the dark without fear, and step into the unknown with smiles on our faces, even if we're faking them.
--Neil Gaiman

Caring People

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." To this day, especially in times of "disaster," I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers--so many caring people in this world.
--Fred Rogers (Mister Rogers)

Humans

It was not simply a question of rescheduling a ritual, a party or a gathering; these celebrations, from all the faiths and from none, push back against the dominance of the long winter night. No one is more essential to them than humans between, say, ages 5 and 9, who are balanced between the world of reason and the world of magic.
--Jim Dwyer

Barbarism

Self-government and its institutions--public schools, police and fire departments, the ridiculously underfunded mental-health facilities, and all the people to whom we increasingly begrudge their salaries--are the only things keeping us from falling back into barbarism, and the only things keeping us safe and sane when one of us falls back into it on their own.
--Charles P. Pierce

Amendments

When the Patriot Act was thumbing its nose at the First Amendment, we were told "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." And yet, when the Second Amendment is discussed, the Constitution is very much a suicide pact. The First Amendment is phrased as an absolute. We treat as conditional. The Second is phrased conditionally. We treat it as an absolute.
--Kurt Weldon

Reverence

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?
--Garry Wills

Terrible Vastness

Apparitions and massacres both come out of nowhere, like dispatches from a world that's beyond our comprehension, their existence so momentous and irrational that they seem to demand from us items of sacrifice and tribute. It is dark now in Newtown, but they are still laying wreaths and flowers, just as they will for days and days, compelled to commemorate something they can hardly believe happened; to touch a terrible vastness they can't begin to understand.
--Justin Peters

Too Much

Too much information is almost always a turnoff. Note how "Foie Gras" sounds delightful, yet "Spreadable Ruptured Liver" does not.
--Carina Chocano

Right and Wrong

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependent upon popular opinion?
--William Lloyd Garrison

None Of You

People who are not Syrian ask me the most painful question, "Why do your people kill each other?" I usually give long-winded explanations, gesturing with my hands but without eye contact, offering historical and logical precedents of tyranny and oppression and revolution and freedom. But I don't tell them what I should, not out of kindness, but out of pity and because it scares me to admit how hardened I've become over the last 20 months: Don't you dare, even for one second, believe that your people and your cities are immune to what happened to my country, my friend. None of you are.
--Amal Hanano

Intent

To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life's neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

Purpose

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
--Bertrand Russell

Undecided

They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.
--Winston Churchill

Heart

One of the reasons I believe in jazz is that the oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It's the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat. It's the first thing you hear when you're born--or before you're born--and it's the last thing you hear.
--Dave Brubeck

Rules

Following a list of rules, our hearts are not free to dance in response to another--we are only dully plodding along in an imitation waltz.
--Suzanne Clothier

Happen

What could have happened did happen.
--Dan Jenkins

Time

Many of us these days, we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life, that keeps us feeling terrified and alone. I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time.
--Fiona Apple

Measure

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor: he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
--Mark Twain

Quiet

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
--Bertrand Russell

Help

Help. Help us walk through this. Help us come through.
It is the first great prayer.
--Anne Lamott

Discretion

Listen, all I can say is I was a lot more discreet as a candidate than I was in real life. Can I say that? Maybe it's indiscreet to talk about discretion.
--Elizabeth Warren

Lincoln

The greatness of Napoleon, Caesar or Washington is only moonlight by the sun of Lincoln. His example is universal and will last thousands of years. Washington was a typical American, Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world.
--Leo Tolstoy

Strange Pull

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.
 It will not lead you astray.
--Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Licking

Conservatives lost, and now they are just licking their wounds. Licking your wounds was, ironically, also part of their health care plan.
--Amanda Reckinwith

Virtue

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
--Oscar Wilde

Happiness

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
--Jack Gilbert

Poured

I am not a self-made man by any stretch of the imagination. There have been countless people that poured into me in a way that changed my life.
--R.A. Dickey

Broken

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
--Ernest Hemingway

Experience

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
--Fred Brooks

Comparisons

I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't do any good to compare disasters. The one that you live through is the one with the most impact. Period.
--Jeanette D.

Just Slowly Enough

Global warming happens just slowly enough that political systems have been able to ignore it. The distress signal is emitted at a frequency that scientists can hear quite clearly, but is seemingly just beyond the reach of most politicians.
--Bill McKibben

Latino

Mitt Romney actually endorsed Arizona's immigration policies. You can't fix this by flashing more pictures of brown people. This is not a "branding problem." This is a "problem problem." Latino voters didn't go crazy. Latino voters went voter.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates

Bullshit

I really hate bullshit. I hate it from other people, and I hate it from myself. The more bullshit there is in this world, the less clarity we have about the world around us. Bullshit is the clarity killer. It is the enemy of objectivity.
--Razib Khan

Government

Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men.
--John Adams

Communal

We vote because it is something we do together, for one another. We do not vote to take something back from someone else. We do not vote in a bubble, even if we think we do. Voting is communal, whether we want to look at it that way or not.
--Charles P. Pierce

Commonwealth

A commitment to being part of a self-governing political commonwealth is the only means of common protection we have left, and to deny that is to whistle your way past the true nature of the threat.
--Charles P. Pierce

Weather

We can't say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.
--Eric Pooley (senior vice president, Environmental Defense Fund)