“You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.”
~C.S. Lewis

“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
~Mark Twain

“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.”
~Fred Rogers

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
~Flannery O’Connor

“I want to live in a world of a marketplace of ideas where everybody is busted on their bullshit all the time because I think that’s the way we get to truth.”
~Penn Jillette

“He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. His eyes are closed.”
~Albert Einstein

“Never, never be afraid to do what’s right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”
~Martin Luther King

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
~Mark Twain

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”
~Adam Smith

“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
~Mark Twain

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
~Aldous Huxley

“All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.”
~Carl Sagan

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”
~Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
~Albert Einstein

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something in your life.”
~Winston Churchill

“You are a human being. You have rights inherent in that reality. You have dignity and worth that exists prior to law.”
~Lyn Beth Neylon

“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”
~Dante

“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.”
~Mark Twain

“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.”
~Muhammad Ali

“We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.”
~William Osler

“Science has the answer to every question that can be asked. However, science reserves the right to change the answer should additional data become available.”
~Mary Roach

“Education is the transmission of civilization.”
~Will Durant

“I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.”
~George Carlin

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
~George Bernard Shaw

“Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”
~Ayn Rand

“Never forget that native intelligence is widely distributed in our species.”
~Carl Sagan – The Demon-Haunted World (1996)

“People have to go out of their minds before they can come to their senses.”
~Timothy Leary

“We live in a world where poverty is a product of not having enough wealth, but a new type of poverty has arisen in our midst: the poverty of time. There never seems to be enough of it. One of the promises of our technology was to allow us to have more free time to pursue things that nurture us, rather than having to deal with things that stress us out. But we always manage to fill those empty spaces with more things that are supposed to give us more time. Somewhere along the line, we changed from human beings into human doings. Is this what life is all about?”
~Gary Moring – The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Einstein (2000)

“Revolutionaries are dead men on furlough.”
~Vladimir Lenin

“The only peace it is meaningful to speak of is world peace.”
~His Holiness the Dalai Lama – Ethics for the New Millennium (1999)

“There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.”
~Salvador Dali

“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.”
~Albert Einstein

Some people make the world special just by being in it.

“We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.”
~Epictetus, Roman philosopher and former slave – Discourses

Suburbia: where they tear out the trees and then name streets after them.

“In a world in transition, students and teachers both need to teach themselves one essential skill — learning how to learn.”
~Carl Sagan – The Demon-Haunted World (1996)

“The historian should be fearless and incorruptible; a man of independence, loving frankness and truth.”
~Lucian of Samosata – How History Should Be Written (170)

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

“The first law is that the historian shall never dare to set down what is false; the second, that he shall never dare to conceal the truth; the third, that there shall be no suspicion in his work of either favoritism or prejudice.”
~Cicero

A conscience does not prevent sin. It only prevents you from enjoying it.

“And those who are peacemakers will plant seeds of peace and reap a harvest of goodness.”
~James 3:18

“Even at levels far short of those that can cause our extinction, our technology has given us awesome powers–our ancestors would have thought them god-like.”
~Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan – Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1994)

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
~J.R.R. Tolkien

“Let there be no strife between you and me…for we are brothers.”
~Genesis 13:8

“He who allows oppression shares the crime.”
~Erasmus Darwin

“The Internet changes a lot of stuff. But one very important thing it does not change is human nature.”
~Jeff Bezos

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
~Pablo Picasso

“Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.”
~Albert Einstein

“Since for primitive mammals sleepless nights would have been more dangerous for the survival of the taxon than sexless nights, sleep should be a more powerful drive than sex — which, at least in most of us, it seems to be.”
~Carl Sagan – Dragons of Eden (1977)

“The consensual process of truth seeking is based on the simple assumption that all of us thinking together are smarter than any one of us thinking alone.”
~Parker Palmer, educator

“I belong to the only species in the history of the world that systematically tortures and murders its own members for pleasure, profit, and convenience.”
~George Carlin

“Everyone should have two mentors: someone twice their age and someone half their age.”
~Jennifer Corriero

“We’ve benefited from our global civilization; can’t we modify our behavior slightly to preserve it?”
~Carl Sagan – Billions & Billions (1996)

“People are not truly self-governing unless they are free to fail.”
~Stephen R. Covey

“Modern man is frantically trying to earn enough to buy things he’s too busy to enjoy.”
~Frank Clark

“Sometime in the next thirty years, very quietly one day we will cease to be the brightest things on earth.”
~James McAlear

“The fortunate thing about humanity is that–so far–or power to heal has outweighed or power to destroy.”
~Eric P. Metze

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”
~Henry David Thoreau

“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There are other ways of making people identical [besides cloning]. We can put them through the same schools and subject them to eight hours of TV every day. That works a lot better. Why do you think Americans are buying SUVs?”
~Steven Willadsen

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
~Harry S. Truman

“A new consciousness is developing which recognizes that we are one species.”
~Carl Sagan – Cosmos (1975)

“The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has obtained liberation from the self.”
~Albert Einstein

“My knowledge is like a drop in a vast ocean of promise.”
~Tan Sen

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

“The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”
~Thomas Paine

“I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they plan their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change.”
~Jim Rohn

What’s done to children, they will do to society.

“The price we pay for anticipation of the future is anxiety about it.”
~Carl Sagan – Dragons of Eden (1977)

A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.

“We’re all fucked. It helps to remember that.”
~George Carlin

“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
~Anne Frank

“The human race is the only race ‘intelligent’ enough to know what suicide is but dumb enough to actually do it.”
~Eric P. Metze

“All the social and political and theological justifications are attempts to rationalize, after the fact, human feelings that are at the same time utterly obvious and profoundly mysterious.”
~Carl Sagan – Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1992)

“In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
~Martin Luther King, Jr.

“We’re all amateurs; it’s just that some of us are more professional about it than others.”
~George Carlin

“If we become even slightly more violent, shortsighted, ignorant, and selfish than we are now, almost certainly we will have no future.”
~Carl Sagan – Pale Blue Dot (1994)

“The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind.”
~Humphrey Bogart

Of all the nice things you’ll say about me at my funeral, could you say it today when I really need to hear it?

“The desire to be fucked-up probably leaves you, but the desire to be high never does.”
~Kris Kristofferson

Real friends are those who, when you feel you’ve made a fool of yourself, don’t feel you’ve done a permanent job.

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
~Abraham Lincoln

“Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.”
~Carl Sagan – Cosmos (1975)

“History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstances.”
~Donald Creighton

“Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.”
~Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

“The day you realize you’re going to die is the last day of your childhood.”
~Patrick Ely

“We can enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them.”
~Benjamin Tucker

“If we can accomplish the integration of the Earth without obliterating cultural differences or destroying ourselves, we will have accomplished a great thing.”
~Carl Sagan – Cosmos (1975)

“Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.”
~Albert Einstein

“Yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of ashes.”
~Marcus Aurelius

“It is well that war is so terrible–we should grow too fond of it.”
~Robert E. Lee

“Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is a matter of the will, quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.”
~Samuel Ullman

“War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.”
~Thomas Hardy

“We go to great lengths to deny our animal heritage, and not just in scientific and philosophical discourse. You can glimpse the denial in the shaving of men’s faces; in clothing and other adornments; in the great lengths gone to in the preparation of meat to disguise the fact that an animal is being killed, flayed, and eaten. The common primate practice of pseudosexual mounting of males by males to express dominance is not widespread in humans, and some have taken comfort from this fact. But the most potent form of verbal abuse in English and many other languages is “Fuck you,” with the pronoun “I” implicit at the beginning. The speaker is vividly asserting his claim to higher status, and his contempt for those he considers subordinate. Characteristically, humans have converted a postural image into a linguistic one with barely a change in nuance. The phrase is uttered millions of times each day, all over the planet,with hardly anyone stopping to think what it means. Often, it escapes our lips unbidden. It is satisfying to say. It serves its purpose. It is a badge of the primate order, revealing something of our nature despite all our denials and pretensions.”
~Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan – Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1994)

“We are too weak to destroy or seriously damage the planet, or to extinguish all life on Earth. That is far beyond our powers. But what we *can* do is to destroy our global civilization and, just possibly, sufficiently alter the environment as to render our own species, along with vast numbers of others, extinct.”
~Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan – Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1994)

“No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean.”
~Henry Brooks Adams