“Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”
Carl Sagan
“Mankind’s history has proved from one era to another that the true criterion of leadership is spiritual. Men are attracted by spirit. By power, men are forced. Love is engendered by spirit.”
Malcolm X
“They cannot be taught to read and are the ugliest and most stupid race I ever saw.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero on the ancient Britons
“Vision without execution is just hallucination.”
Thomas Edison
“Evil is a loud and boisterous debaucherer, [for] man remembers what hurts more than what pleases.”
Naguib Mahfouz
“And strangest of all; they are able to endure hunger, cold, or any kind of hardship by plunging into the swamps, where they exist for many days with only their heads above water.”
Cassius Dio on the ancient Britons
“The technological system retains enormous vitality, probably more than ever before, and the counsel of restraint is unlikely to be heeded.”
John von Neumann
“One person gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty.”
Proverbs 11:24
“There shall be only one object: to get a good airplane built on time. Engineers shall always work within a stone’s throw of the airplane being built.”
Kelly Johnson
“Perfect valour is to do without witnesses what one would do before all the world.”
La Rochefoucauld
“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find it is vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible.”
T E Lawrence
“In trivial matters strictness and rule-breaking are opposed. But in questions that really matter, only rule-breakers can be truly strict.”
Paul Graham
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.”
Marie Curie
“If monkeys could reach the point of being bored, they could turn into human beings.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“What is the use of climbing Mount Everest? And my answer must at once be, it is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever.”
George Mallory (who would perish on the mountain in 1924)
“If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.”
Stanley Kubrick
“London - where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts.”
Voltaire
"Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier."
Samuel Johnson
“You have it now and that is all your life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow.”
Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls
“Religion to me is science, and science is religion. In that deeply-felt truth lies the secret of my intense devotion to the reading of God's natural works.”
Ada Lovelace
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Blaise Pascal
“Who among you can at the same time laugh and be exalted? He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary. Untroubled, scornful, outrageous - that is how wisdom wants us to be. She is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Kerls, wollt ihr den ewig leben?”
(“Chaps, would you wish to live forever?”)
Frederick the Great to the hesitating Guards at the Battle of Kolin