Margaret Atwood 

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

A word after a word after a word is power.

It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.

Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Sophocles

Money is the worst currency that ever grew among mankind. This sacks cities, this drives men from their homes, this teaches and corrupts the worthiest minds to turn base deeds.

Hide nothing, for time, which sees all and hears all, exposes all.  

Hush! Check those words. Do not cure ill with ill and make your pain still heavier than it is.

I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

I would prefer even to fail with honor than win by cheating.

If it were possible to cure evils by lamentation and to raise the dead with tears, then gold would be a less valuable thing than weeping.

Much speech is one thing, well-timed speech is another.

Much wisdom often goes with fewest words.

No enemy is worse than bad advice.

No lie ever reaches old age.

No one longs to live more than someone growing old.

No speech can stain what is noble by nature.

Yogi Berra

A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.

All pitchers are liars or crybabies.

Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.

Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.

Congratulations. I knew the record would stand until it was broken.

Even Napoleon had his Watergate.

Half the lies they tell about me aren't true.

He hits from both sides of the plate. He's amphibious.

I always thought that record would stand until it was broken.

I never said most of the things I said.

I wish I had an answer to that because I'm tired of answering that question.

I'm a lucky guy and I'm happy to be with the Yankees. And I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary.

I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.

If people don't want to come out to the ball park, nobody's gonna stop 'em.

B. F. Skinner

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious.

The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

 I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

Edward. O. Wilson

Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?

A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

Alfred Tennyson

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Yet fill my glass: give me one kiss:my own sweet Alice, we must die. There's somewhat in this world amiss shall be unriddled by and by.

"My life is dreary, He cometh not," she said; She said, "I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!"

Yet fill my glass: give me one kiss:
My own sweet Alice, we must die.
There's somewhat in this world amiss
Shall be unriddled by and by.

And as the boat-head wound along the willowy hills and fields among, they heard her singing her last song, the Lady of Shalott . . .

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we've forgotten there’s any other way.

He knew now that he had always been a fool.

My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.

Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher — a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity.

Just think how it would be if every one else looked at things as you do — what would the world be like?

Robert A. Heinlein

Hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word "psychology" was ever invented. It works, too.

A rational anarchist believes that concepts, such as "state" and "society" and "government" have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame ... as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world ... aware that his efforts will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.

Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often confuses one for the other, or assumes the greater the love, the greater the jealousy. In fact they are almost incompatible; both at once produce unbearable turmoil.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

If you would know a man, observe how he treats a cat.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

You would not easily guess
All the modes of distress
Which torture the tenants of earth;
And the various evils,
Which like so many devils,
Attend the poor souls from their birth.

Sweet the rose which lives in Heaven,
Although on earth ’tis planted . . .

GOVERNMENT has no rights; it is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their own. It is therefore just, only so far as it exists by their consent, useful only so far as it operates to their well-being.

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?

Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle —
Why not I with thine?'

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.

Large increases in cost with questionable increases in performance can be tolerated only in race horses and women.

Science is bound, by the everlasting vow of honour, to face fearlessly every problem which can be fairly presented to it.

The atheistic idea is so nonsensical that I cannot put it into words.

The true measure of a man is what he would do if he knew he would never be caught.