A man can do what he wants. But he can’t want what he wants.

--Arthur Schopenhauer

Choose only one master -- Nature.

--Rembrandt, painter and etcher (1606-1669)

In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.

--Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

I am not a champion of lost causes, but of causes not yet won.

--Norman Thomas

What I stand for is what I stand on.

--Wendell Berry, farmer, author (b. 1934)

The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime.

— Pink Floyd, "Free Four"

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

--Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, biologist, author (1941-2002)

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, (1805-1859)

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

--Henry Kissinger

When the flag is unfurled, all reason is in the trumpet.

--Ukrainian proverb

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

--James Harvey Robinson

No two people see the external world in exactly the same way. To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is – in other words, not a thing, but a think.

--Penelope Fitzgerald, British author

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

--Will Durant

Truth never damages a cause that is just.

--Mohandas K. Gandhi

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

--Aldous Huxley

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

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

--Galileo Galilei,

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."

--Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, English author

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

--Samuel Johnson

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

--Eric Hoffer

Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.

--Sir Claus Moser

Knowledge tells us that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom prevents us from putting it into a fruit salad.

--Miles Kington

Chance favors only the prepared mind.

--Louis Pasteur, French scientist