- Only the mediocre are always at their best.
- – Jean Giraudoux
- Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.
- – Samuel Johnson, quoted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson
- Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
- – Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (1950), “Outline of Intellectual Rubbish”
- With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
- – Steven Weinberg, quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999
- I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
- – Robert McCloskey, State Department spokesman (attributed)
- In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal it.
- – Unknown
- An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.
- – Robert A. Humphrey
- When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‘Did you sleep good?’ I said ‘No, I made a few mistakes.’
- – Steven Wright
- Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it’s compounding a felony.
- – Robert Benchley
- The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
- – George F. Will
- I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
- – H. L. Mencken
- Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
- – Albert Einstein, (attributed)
- 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
- As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
- – Albert Einstein
