Scientific research: the only sort of poetry that is state supported. -- Jean Rostand

I supply the much-needed 'don't know-how'. -- Stanislaw Ulaum

It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that. G. H. Hardy

Competition in academia is so vicious because the stakes are so small. -- Laurence Peter, " Peter's Theory of Entrepreneurial Aggressiveness in Higher Education," Peter's People 1979

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing. -- Gertrude Stein

Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated. --M. C. Reed

It's like I always say. Life gives you lemons, you blow those lemons to bits with your laser canons. - Brak, The Brak Show

As E.M. Forster so brilliantly put it, 'It is difficult, after accepting six cups of tea, to throw the seventh in the face of your hostess.' Sometimes the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously contemplate getting out, doing the impossible, flinging the conventional tea." - Carolyn Gold Heilbrun

I say if yer heart dont break once a day, it shows a lack of imagination. -- Lefty (Praire Home Companion)

You get yourself the right pair of trousers and people will remember you for years afterwards -- Chet Atkins (Praire Home Companion)

It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations. -- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)

If you decide you don't have to get A's, you can learn an enormous amount in college. -- I. I. Rabi.

Man's destiny is to know, if only because societies with knowledge culturally dominate societies that lack it. Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young. -- Edward O. Wilson

Ask yourself if you are happy and you cease to be so. -- John Stuart Mills

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. -- Susan B. Anthony

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid. - Henry James

Do them for the fun of it ... What one fool can do, so can another, and the fact that some other fool beat you to it shouldn't disturb you: you should get a kick out of having discovered something. - Feynman "Feynman Lectures on Computation"

Who ever heard a theologian preface his creed, or a politician conclude his speech with an estimate of the probable error of his opinion? -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next they say it had been discovered before. Lastly they say they always believed it. -- Louis Agassiz (1807-1873)

There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science. -- Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

As a woman, I have no country - Virginia Woolf

It is not true that life is one damn thing after another. It's one damn thing over and over. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. -- Wolfgang Pauli

Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation. - Susan B. Anthony

"Thinking is my fighting," -- Virginia Woolf in 1940. (p. 159, Out of the Cage)

"To create real confusion, it takes thinking." Professor Robert Gunning, Real Analysis Lecture 11/11/02

"That's the cause of much misery in the modern world. Too many real numbers." Professor Robert Gunning, Real Analysis Lecture 11/15/02

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite. -- Paul Dirac (1902-1984)

If I could prove by logic that you would die in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but my sorrow would be very much mitigated by pleasure in the proof. -- G.H. Hardy to Bertrand Russell

...to think about and prepare for war is boring, boring for everyone. It's being locked in barracks. -- Natalie Clifford Barney

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books. --Thomas Carlyle

Having fun isn't hard, when you've got a library card - the kid's cartoon "Arthur" on PBS

If you like girls like goldie-locks, like a thin line, like a soda pop, well you see, that will never be me. -- Anna Oxygen

Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions. -- Carolyn Heilbrun

Let's not forget that people used to say that women couldn't drive an automobile. -- Professor Nancy Hopkins on Lawrence Summer's comments about women scientists.

A formative influence on my undergraduate self was the response of a respected elder statesmen of the Oxford Zoology Department when an American visitor had just publicly disproved his favourite theory. The old man strode to the front of the lecture hall, shook the American warmly by the hand and declared in ringing, emotional tones: "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years." And we clapped our hands red. Can you imagine a Government Minister being cheered in the House of Commons for a similar admission? "Resign, Resign" is a much more likely response! -- Richard Dawkins

Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones. - Natalie Clifford Barney

Unfortunately, the tactical advice you get from books and magazines is intended for winners or for people who aspire to be winners. As such, it doesn't apply to you. -- BikeSnob NYC

For example, by mountain biking I've learned from my tendency to ride around obstacles instead of over them and from my technique of stopping, dismounting, and visually inspecting drop-offs before riding off of them that I am both lazy and cowardly. I've also learned by being dropped from races and rides of all kinds that I don't like it when things get difficult, and that no matter what you're doing you can always quit. And that is a beautiful lesson. Knowing that life itself is optional is the key to getting through it. -- BikeSnob NYC

I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults. -- Molly Ivins

And one of the most important truths I've learned is that where there are crowds there is stupidity. When large numbers of people get together, stupid things happen, and you're almost always better off simply getting as far away from the crowd as possible. -- BikeSnob NYC

I don't want to make the wrong mistake. -- Yogi Berra

The first rule of holes: when you're in one, stop digging. -- Molly Ivins

You have lost a good opportunity to shut up. --Sarkozy to Cameron, Dec 2011, over the Euro crisis

Alles hat zwei Seiten, eine schlechte und eine noch schlechtere. -- Bavarian Grantler attitude, as expressed by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

Heim kommt man nie. Aber wo befreundete Wege zusammenlaufen, da sieht die ganze Welt fuer eine Stunde wie Heimat aus. - Hermann Hesse, Demian

Die Geliebte, die wir verlassen, der Freund von dem wir uns trennen mussten, verloren sind beide fuer uns auf immer! Die, die wir vielleicht nach Jahren wiedersehen, sind nicht mehr dieselben, von denen wir schieden, und sie finden ja auch uns nicht mehr wieder! -- E. T. A. Hoffmann, Serapionsbrueder, Erster Band der Erzaehlungen und Maerchen

A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate -- these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. -- Ben Bernanke, Princeton Commencement Speech 2013

Der Sinn des Lebens ist zu leben. -- Agnes Heller

You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas. -- Davy Crockett

Das Leben kann sehr kurz sein wenn man sich auf zu wenig Dinge konzentriert. -- Friedrich Liechtenstein, Bad Gastein

"Nationalisme, c'est la guerre" -- François Mitterrand