Edward Abbey

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.

The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth - with a capital G. 'Progress' in our nation has for too long been confused with 'Growth'; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better - toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do.

Vandana Shiva

You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.

Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.

Gandhi is the other person. I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy — not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.

In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.

We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.

Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

Chelsea Handler

Laugh loudly, laugh often, and most important, laugh at yourself.

There are two kinds of people I don't trust: people who don't drink and people who collect stickers.

I went out with a guy who once told me I didn’t need to drink to make myself more fun to be around. I told him, I’m drinking so that you’re more fun to be around.

Obviously, if I was serious about having a relationship with someone long-term, the last people I would introduce him to would be my family.

Are you there vodka? It's me, Chelsea. Please get me out of jail and I promise I will never drink again. Drink and drive. I will never drink and drive again. I may even start my own group fashioned after MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but I'll call it AWLTDASH, Alcoholics Who Like to Drink and Stay Home.

My mother told me that life isn't always about pleasing yourself and that sometimes you have to do things for the sole benefit of another human being. I completely agreed with her, but reminded her that was what blow jobs were for.

Rodney Dangerfield II

I came from a real tough neighborhood. Once a guy pulled a knife on me. I knew he wasn't a professional, the knife had butter on it.

What a kid I got, I told him about the birds and the bees and he told me about the butcher and my wife.

Once I pulled a job, I was so stupid. I picked a guy's pocket on an airplane and made a run for it.

I came from a real tough neighborhood. Why, every time I shut the window I hurt somebody's fingers.

I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.

When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.

I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous - everyone hasn't met me yet.

I could tell that my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.

I told my wife the truth. I told her I was seeing a psychiatrist. Then she told me the truth: that she was seeing a psychiatrist, two plumbers, and a bartender.

Eduardo Galeano

I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.

The Church says: the body is a sin.
Science says: the body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The Body says: I am a fiesta.

Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps,
it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it
swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance.

We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.

I am not particularly interested in
saving time; I prefer to enjoy it.

In 1492, the natives discovered they were indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that the Sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and the dress, and had sent to be burnt alive who worships the Sun the Moon the Earth and the Rain that wets it.

Werner Heisenberg

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.'

Mindy Kaling

There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it.

One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three with whom you struggle to find things to talk about.

You should know I disagree with a lot of traditional advice. For instance, they say the best revenge is living well. I say it’s acid in the face—who will love them now?

I'm the kind of person who would rather get my hopes up really high and watch them get dashed to pieces than wisely keep my expectations at bay and hope they are exceeded. This quality has made me a needy and theatrical friend, but has given me a spectacularly dramatic emotional life.

Sometimes you just have to put on lip gloss and pretend to be psyched.

I say if you love something, set it in a small cage and pester and smother it with love until it either loves you back or dies.

I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Dream, Dream Dream
Dreams transform into thoughts 
And thoughts result in action.

Dream is not that which you see while sleeping it is something that does not let you sleep.

It Is Very Easy To Defeat Someone, But It Is Very Hard To Win Someone.

For great men, religion is a way of making friends; small people make religion a fighting tool.

Don't take rest after your first victory because if you fail in second, more lips are waiting to say that your first victory was just luck.

Learning gives creativity
Creativity leads to thinking
Thinking provides knowledge
Knowledge makes you great.

Thinking is the capital, Enterprise is the way, Hard Work is the solution.

Thomas A. Edison II

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Five percent of the people think; 
ten percent of the people think they think; 
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.

We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.

If we all did the things we are really capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.

When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this - you haven't.

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

Dan Barker

Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing "Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.

The next time believers tell you that 'separation of church and state' does not appear in our founding document, tell them to stop using the word 'trinity.' The word 'trinity' appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does Rapture, or Second Coming, or Original Sin. If they are still unfazed (or unphrased), by this, then add Omniscience, Omnipresence, Supernatural,Transcendence, Afterlife, Deity, Divinity, Theology, Monotheism, Missionary, Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Christianity, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Methodist, Catholic, Pope, Cardinal, Catechism, Purgatory, Penance, Transubstantiation, Excommunication, Dogma, Chastity, Unpardonable Sin, Infallibility, Inerrancy, Incarnation, Epiphany, Sermon, Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer, Good Friday, Doubting Thomas, Advent, Sunday School, Dead Sea, Golden Rule, Moral, Morality, Ethics, Patriotism, Education, Atheism, Apostasy, Conservative (Liberal is in), Capital Punishment, Monogamy, Abortion, Pornography, Homosexual, Lesbian, Fairness, Logic, Republic, Democracy, Capitalism, Funeral, Decalogue, or Bible.

Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy.