"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"

-- Barry Goldwater

"Whatever be our conception of the universe we must, it is obvious, start somehow; we must begin with something; and the something with which we begin, from the very fact that we do begin with it, must itself be without explanation, since, if something else were invoked to explain it, then the 'something else' must needs be logically prior to that which it is invoked to explain. Thus the 'something' being explained by a logically prior 'something else' could not have been ultimate."

-- C. E. M. Joad

"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness."

-- Andre Malraux
French author & resistance leader (1901 - 1976)

"When the time comes to enter the darkness in which we are naked and helpless and alone; in which we see the insufficiency of our greatest strength and the hollowness of our strongest virtues; in which we have nothing of our own to rely on, and nothing in our nature to support us, and nothing in the world to guide us or give us fight—then we find out whether or not we live by faith."

-- Thomas Merton

"That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans."

-- C. S. Lewis (Surprised By Joy, 1955)

"Why be a man when you can be a success?"

-- Bertolt Brecht

“Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, play the man! We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”

-- Hugh Latimer

"Water is for washing your feet. Beer is for drinking."

-- Kosmo Spoetzl

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

- Douglas Adams

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

-- Oliver Cromwell

"The opening chords are from the last movement of Vaughan Williams' Sixth Symphony. It goes from there to a Skip James motif. Following that it moves to a Gregorian chant, Dies Irae. It's the most scary one in the Episcopal hymn books, it's all about the day of judgment. Then it returns to the Vaughan Williams chords, followed by a blues run of undetermined origin, then back to Skip James and so forth."

-- John Fahey, describing his piece, "Stomping Tonight on the Pennsylvania/Alabama Border" as found on the album Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes.

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'"

-- Charles M. Schulz

"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question."

-- Stephen Jay Gould

"For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing."

--H. L. Mencken

"A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff nature replaces it with."

--Tennessee Williams

"Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows."

-- David T. Wolf

"Failures are very public, and successes are short lived. It's the pleasure of drawing funny pictures that makes up for it."

--Bill Watterson
US cartoonist (1958 - )

"It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."

-- Tom Lehrer

"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."

-- G. K. Chesterton

"Victory or death!"

-- Col. William Barret Travis