Life and the Universe

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone is to discover exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced with something even more bizarrely inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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"We are on the eve of discovering that nothing should be done for the sake of gods, but all for the good of man - nothing for another world - everything for this."

Carl Sagan

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"True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness."

Albert Einstein

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"A man who limits his interests, limits his life."

Vincent Price

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"It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent that man - for precisely the same reason."

Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

War and Tyranny

"I have marched in many a battle host, but I have also planted seeds and reaped the harvest with my own hands. And I have learned there is a greater honor in a field well plowed than a field steeped in blood."

Adaon
The Black Cauldron
Lloyd Alexander

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"As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have its fascinations. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular."

Oscar Wilde

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"All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes - all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's earth."

Rod Serling
"Death's Head Revisited"

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"Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back!"

Albus Dumbledore
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
J.K. Rowling

Irony

"The Yahoos were known to hate one another more than they did any different species of animals; and the reason usually assigned was the odiousness of their own shapes, which all could see in the rest, but not in themselves."

Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travels

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"A treacherous friend is the most dangerous enemy; and I will say boldly that both religion and virtue have received more real discredit from hypocrites than the wittiest profligates or infidels could ever cast upon them; nay, farther, as these two, in their purity, are rightly called the bands of civil society, and are indeed the greatest of blessings; so when poisoned and corrupted with fraud, pretence, and affectation, they have become the worst of civil curses, and have enabled men to perpetrate the most cruel mischiefs to their own species."

Henry Fielding
Tom Jones

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"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love - they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Harry Lime
The Third Man
Graham Greene

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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

Arthur Schopenhauer

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"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."

Douglas Adams
Last Chance To See

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"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"

Samuel Johnson, referring to American colonists in 1775

Humans Suck

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own - for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone."

Rod Serling
"The Monsters are Due on Maple Street"

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"You know, there are times when it's a source of personal pride to not be human."

Hobbes
Calvin and Hobbes
Bill Watterson

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"It was an unhappy truth, he told himself, that nearly all people in the world behave badly when there is something really big at stake."

Roald Dahl
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

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"I suspect you're becoming more and more human all the time."
"Captain, I see no reason to stand here and be insulted."

Kirk and Spock
Star Trek - "The Devil in the Dark"
Gene L. Coon

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

George Carlin

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"Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings."

Helen Keller

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"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."

Calvin
Calvin and Hobbes
Bill Watterson

Reflection & Advice

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

Aldous Huxley

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"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

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"I have no respect for titled rank, unless it be accompanied with true nobility of soul."

Washington Irving
The Sketch Book

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"Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker is sorry."

Mark Twain

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"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."

Aesop

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"There's only one thing that I know how to do well, and I've often been told that you only can do what you know how to do well, and that's be you. Be what you're like. Be like yourself."

They Might Be Giants
"Whistling in the Dark"

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"There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy."

H.P. Lovecraft
Celephaïs

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"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."

Mark Twain

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"Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere."

Anton Ego
Ratatouille
Brad Bird

Amusing Tidbits

"Love, and a bit with a dog. That's what they want."

Henslow
Shakespeare in Love
Tom Stoppard

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"There are three things I've learned never to discuss with people - religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin."

Linus
It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
Charles M. Schulz

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"Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong."

Cecil Graham
Lady Windermere's Fan
Oscar Wilde