Facts, like living things, have a value in and of themselves and demand respect. Yet some people use them as means to an end, and dismiss them as soon as they are done using them.

True ideas seem to suffer from repetition, while stupid ones tend to flourish.

A thousand truths can be assembled in such a way as to create a colossal lie.

As time and space are bent by gravity, so too is truth bent by power.

You may never live long enough to discover who you are, but by the time you reach middle age you will hopefully realize who you are not.

Technology has not made humanity any wiser, it has only made us more dangerous.

What is wisdom? It is the result of multiple paradigms brought to their intellectual furthest reaches and balanced and merged together. The fundamentalist, the person who only sees life through a single lens, can never hope for wisdom.

Sometimes you come to realize you understand something but you can’t explain it to anyone, not even yourself. This is perhaps the most sacred kind of understanding.

There is no greater thing than to be oneself, and it is never too late to do so.

Where there is hope there is life.

Death is the night sky, the background against which the fleeting fireworks of life are displayed, an empty stage upon which the drama of life is played.

Science is the process of obscuring the marvelous with explanations.

A library is a sacred place where the voices of the ancients can still be heard if we but give them the required silence.

We have created a world we don’t like, don’t understand and don’t trust, and we are too frightened to try to change it.

My problem as a writer is that—whenever I meet someone for the first time—I immediately invent for them a personality and background that are invariably more interesting than the ones they possess. And confirming this character to be uninteresting after a few minutes of conversation, I decide that they are unnecessary to my story and begin devising ways to kill them off.

A politician is someone who knows everything about running a campaign and nothing about running a country.

Art is the medium through which new thoughts, perspectives, and attitudes are brought into the world.

Art helps you connect to the world, not escape from it. That is the difference between art and entertainment.

Once art served to educate and edify, now it distracts and amuses.

Intelligence is overrated. Two dogs who sniff each others’ butts learn more about each other in a moment than many humans understand about those they’ve known for a lifetime.

Intelligence resides between us as much as it resides in us. And it resides within the subconscious much more than it does the conscious. We’re just conscious-biased: our conscious mind wants us to think it’s the be all and end all.

They are always the problem. There is no evil in this world you cannot blame on them. The world will never be right as long as they exist. Whereas we are right, we are always right. We desire to make the world a better place whereas they either consciously desire to make it worse or else are willing to make it so through wrong ideas. There is only one way to make the world we are trying to create, and that is to get rid of them, get rid of every last one of them. And the only way to do that is to stop creating them. Because there is no “they” until we choose to see someone as such. When we choose to see the humanity in everyone, then there is no more they, there is only us.

The places of quiet are going away, the churches, the woods, the libraries. And it is only in silence we can hear the voice inside of us which gives us true peace.

Forget scientists. The next space launch we should send up painters, poets and musicians. I’d be more interested in what they discover than anything that takes place in a test tube.

Those who rule have always had an interest in shaping the perceptions of those they wish to rule. But never in the history of humanity has their toolbox been so full. Advances in technology and psychology have enabled the messages of the rulers to permeate our consciousness to a degree no prior society could have imagined.

Once you realize that life and love are not things you can possess but forces that emanate through us and through all creation, then you can begin to appreciate the miracle you are a part of. You can release the burden and appreciate what you have had, have now and will have. Only trying to hold on to what you do not have causes pain. Letting go permits you to experience the incredible joy that comes to you at each and every moment.

I write pre-apocalyptic fiction. In other words, I’m not interested in a future where everything is blown to hell, I’d rather write something that helps to prevent it from happening.

Feminism is not inherently bourgeois, but bourgeois feminism is the only one given voice in our society. That is why women’s issues discuss glass ceilings rather than dirt floors.

To be myself, to follow my desires to the best of my abilities. That’s the only end worth shooting for. Success and failure lie beyond us, they may be signposts that direct us, but they are foolish goals in themselves. To truly be who I have been made to be, made myself to be, ah, that is the only mission worthy of all the life that flows within.

Never in mankind’s history have we so fundamentally changed our means of existence with so little thought.

Sooner or later you realize there are no answers, no answers except the ones you believe. Sooner or later faith is the only answer left.

Life is like a box of chocolates: You get through what little actual good stuff there is right away, then you constantly fool yourself into believing there's still something good in whatever's left.

But failure and success are labels placed upon people’s lives the way a child values winning a game whether or not they have to bend the rules in order to do it. But life is not a game and the rules cannot be bent without repercussions that prove damaging later on. We must play the game for all we are worth, and we must play it fairly. We play and lose and play again, over and over. We lose and we pick up and start again a little wiser. We learn the game a little better in the playing, learn lessons for the next game. And should we lose today it is only a step towards the winning of the larger game. We move our piece on the board one step at a time, but it is all part of some larger process.

He who dies with the most toys...dies a child.

Good enough may be an acceptable end, but it should never be an acceptable goal.

I find myself becoming increasingly nostalgic for the past, but after all I suppose that is the only thing one can be nostalgic about.

There is no unstoppable force but time, no impenetrable object except that which separates us from the past.

To be young and to experience the feeling of being alive is a sweet feeling. To feel alive and to have a purpose and a goal to that life is better still.

Will is a gift from God, desire from the devil.

You’ve got to stop thinking of consciousness as your own. You’re only thinking for yourself when you are by yourself. As soon as you are in the presence of others, your consciousness is linked at some level to those others.

If you want a language to survive, capture great thoughts within it. William Shakespeare has ensured Elizabethan English will never perish from this world.

Contrary to popular belief, you can make people think, but they will hate you for it.

Ignorance is a horrible thing. But arrogance, the belief that knowing a little more than the ignorant makes you wise, is more horrible still.

A truth told once is no match for a lie oft repeated.

I pity the atheist, for he can never fully appreciate a sinful pleasure.

Stories nowadays are put in to squares, just like everything else. Stories are ever changing. They are like rivers that flow, but mankind is busy trying to dam them up and as a result, they become stagnant. They divert the water into square swimming pools, and then add chemicals to it in order to keep it sterile.

Stories are like DNA, they shape the culture that they’re a part of. A society is not a society without its own unique stories. But we allow machines to make our stories, nowadays, or at least to tell them. We allow things to shape our understanding of who we are. We are entertained, not nurtured. We are given Twinkies for our mind, things that amuse but do not enlighten. It tickles our taste buds, but it does not enrich us.

The definition of stupid is the inabilitly to see another side to an argument other than one's own.

Heaven is fleeting, but Hell is an eternity. Hell becomes the more so the longer one lives it.

It really was amazing, thought Mindy, the way modern electronics made it so easy to ignore those people who were physically so close.

Technology is the idol of our age. The Bible describes the evils of worshipping things built by the hand of man. Back then, it was a simple statue, today it is far more insidious. And for every problem technology creates, we look to technology for solutions.

People perceive the divine according to their own biases. That doesn’t make the experience any less real.

The intellect seeks to throw its own interpretation of the real over reality, and in so doing carves the world up into artificial little cubes.

Most animals sleep in a hole in the ground or hanging from a tree. Man alone has made for himself an elaborate resting place. And yet he is the only one to have developed the alarm clock to rouse himself from it, the only species to spend sixteen or more hours of each day away from it.

Simplistic ideas are the weapons with which the thoughtful are clubbed.

I don’t want us to be the species that ruins it for the rest. What we do not consume we poison. Sometimes we do both. Perhaps that is how we shall end, by consuming the poisons we have created.

Here is the paradox of it: the more of an individual you become the more you realize we are interrelated, that success of one requires the success of all.

Each man is an island unto himself. But though a sea of difference may divide us, an entire world of commonality lies beneath.

There is a third choice besides being busy and killing time, something profound.

If God rewards the faithful with earthly rewards, then what leverage does the devil have?

It is wisdom to know who you are, but not to the point of excluding who you might become.

Perhaps the media may not always be telling what to think, but it is always telling you what to think about.

Safety and constancy were illusions granted only to those afraid enough not to peer beyond the walls.

Where once we aspired to be more like our heroes, today we try to make our heroes more like us.

We look for things or people that are incorruptible. There is nothing incorruptible, merely uncorrupted. We neglect the role we play. We value innocence, but only the kind we cannot alter. We throw mud at purity and mock it for its stain.

Our country is the only one that truly permits you to speak bad of your country, so you really shouldn’t say anything bad about it.

Sometimes you just have to hold on even when you don’t believe in what you’re holding on to anymore. Sometimes you have to hold on to empty and distant memories, even if it feels like there isn’t any ‘you’ left. I think that’s what faith is all about, doing what you need to do even when the feeling isn’t there anymore.

We have to believe in free will, we have no other choice.

Security is an illusion, but it is a pleasant one.

Nothing is taken at face value anymore, everything must be dissected. Perhaps it is the rise of advertisement over church and state. Things once spoken were spoken with strength and authority. Now they are spoken with stealth and with guile. They are spoken not to the rational mind but to the sub-conscious, the mind within the mind.

No, not conquer, that is too foolish a world. Any man who scales a mountain is still but a man, a transient speck compared to the immensity and permanence of a mountain .