I really enjoy a good quote; it’s like getting a novel in a sentence or two.   Here’s are some  quotes that I’ve collected over the past couple of months.  No particular topic.  I hope you enjoy them:

“The initial mystery that attends any journey is how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place.”
Louise Bogan, Journey Around my Room

“The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947)

“Things are going to get unimaginably worse, and they are never, ever going to get better again!”
Kurt Vonnegut (at a graduation speech) (mentioned by Lawrence Krauss at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo )

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
Voltaire (1694 – 1778)

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
Clarence Darrow

“It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965)

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940), “The Crack-Up” (1936)

“My point in Sexual Personae is that one cannot make any kind of firm line between high art and pornography. In fact, porn permeates the high art tradition.”
Camille Paglia Vamps and Tramps, p. 123

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded. Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here today.”
Lawrence Krauss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo “A Universe from Nothing” (min 16:40)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Krauss

“The predominant fact of modern sexual history is not patriarchy but the collapse of the old extended family into the nuclear family, an isolated unit that, in its present form, is claustrophobic and psychologically unstable.  The nuclear family can work only in a pioneer situation, where the punishing physicality of farmwork keeps everyone occupied and spent from dawn to dusk.  The middle-class nuclear family, where the parents are white-collar professionals who do brainwork, is seething with frustrations and tensions.   Words are charged and real authority lies elsewhere, in bosses on the job.  Marooned in the suburbs or in barricaded urban apartments, upwardly mobile families are frantically over-scheduled and geographically transient, with few ties to neighbors and little sustained contact with relatives.   Two parents alone cannot transmit all the wisdom of life to a child.  Clan elders–grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—-performed this function once.”
Camille Paglia  Vamps and Tramps, p. 27

“From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
Groucho Marx (1890 – 1977)

“Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.”
Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. ”
Carl Sagan

“The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.”
Daniel Webster (1782 – 1852)

“Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.”
Laurence J. Peter (1919 – 1988)

“I would challenge anyone here to think of a question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one. Now, you can think of an uncountable number of questions that run the other way, where we once had a religious answer and now the authority of religion has been battered and nullified by science, and by moral progress, and by secular progress generally. And I think that’s not an accident.”
Sam Harris

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

“Once you leave the womb, conservatives don’t care about you until you reach military age.”
George Carlin

“A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.”
William Ralph Inge (1860 – 1954)

“The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.”
Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865)

“It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.”
H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956)

“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus is just as selfish as we are or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition… and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.”
Stephen Colbert - — December 16, 2010 Colbert Report