Joseph Heller

Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.

I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals.

When I grow up I want to be a little boy.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth. Don't you know history?

Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery or simple bad luck.

Paul A. M. Dirac

If we are honest — and scientists have to be — we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions.

It seems clear that the present quantum mechanics is not in its final form.

Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.

There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

George Carlin

If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

I think I am, therefore I am. I think.

I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that.

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

I think people should be allowed to do anything they want. We haven't tried that for a while. Maybe this time it'll work.

Remember, wolves mate for life, and they care for their sick and infirm; they don't run them off, or kill them, or abandon them. Give me a wolf over some fuckin' jackoff rancher any day of the week.

Rene Descartes

Doubt is the origin of wisdom.

Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.

I think, therefore I am.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.

A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.

Will Durant

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.

If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

Edgar Allen Poe

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

Iris Murdoch

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Thomas Jefferson

A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.

I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.

 Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

Plutarch

I would rather excel in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and possessions.

It is indeed a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.

Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

For to err in opinion, though it be not the part of wise men, is at least human.

Prosperity is no just scale; adversity is the only balance to weigh friends.

Neil Gaiman

Life — and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison — is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.

There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.