The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.

In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement, can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

(speaking of Albert Einstein) Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.

(quoting The Bhagavad Gita, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 1945) If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One... I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.

Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.

After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.

Public display of mourning is no longer made by people of fashion, although some flashier kinds of widows may insist on sleeping with only black men during the first year after the death.

George Orwell

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.

The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Arthur O'Shaughnessy, (1844-1881)

Ode
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-brekers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth
Build Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

Sir William Osler

The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.

John Oxenham

For death begins with life's first breath
And life begins at touch of death.