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Stripped for the hardest work, every muscle firm and elastic every ounce of brain ready for use, and not a trace of superfluous flesh on his nervous and supple body, the American stood in the world a new order of man.

John Adams on the American of 1801

As all I have said suggests, it seems to me that all of us, East and West, face one fundamental task from which all else should follow. That task is one of resisting vigilantly, thoughtfully, and attentively, but at the same time with total dedication, at every step and everywhere, the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power -- the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans. We must resist its complex and wholly alienating pressure, whether it takes the form of consumption, advertising, repression, technology, or cliché -- all of which are the blood brothers of fanaticism and the wellspring of totalitarian thought. We must draw our standards from our natural world, heedless of ridicule, and reaffirm its denied validity. We must honor with the humility of the wise the limits of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence. We must relate to the absolute horizon of our existence which, if we but will, we shall constantly rediscover and experience. We must make values and imperatives the starting point of all our acts, of all our personally attested, openly contemplated, and ideologically uncensored lived experience. We must trust the voice of our conscience more than that of all abstract speculations and not invent responsibilities other than the one to which the voice calls us. We must not be ashamed that we are capable of love, friendship, solidarity, sympathy, and tolerance, but just the opposite: we must set these fundamental divisions of our humanity free from their "private" exile and accept them as the only genuine starting point of a meaningful human community. We must be guided by our own reason and service the truth under all circumstances as our own essential experience.

Václav Havel

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Bertrand Russell

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which ARE there.

Richard Feynman

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Richard Feynman

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.

Italo Calvino

Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity.

Richard Dawkins

Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other natural forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in total a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.

Roger Sperry

Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes.

Pierre Simon de Laplace (1812)

Don’t get too much sleep and don’t tell anybody your troubles.

Aristotle Onassis

Anthropocentrism is a disabling vice of the intellect.

Edward O. Wilson

We are forced to see that words are not themselves ideas, but merely strings of ink marks; we see that sounds are nothing more than waves. In a modern age without an Author looking down on us from heaven, language is not a thing of definite certainty, but infinite possibility; without the comforting illusion of meaningful order we have no choice but to stare into the face of meaningless disorder; without the feeling that meaning can be certain, we find ourselves overwhelmed by all the things that words might mean.

Dexter Palmer

What a strange chaos in this wide atmosphere we breathe!... The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest sighs of morality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man's changeful will.

Charles Babbage

A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.

Daniel Dennet (1995)

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

Richard Feynman

One's work may be finished someday, but one's education never.

Alexandre Dumas

It is a fact -- or have I dreamt it -- that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)

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