"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."

-- Oscar Wilde

"Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the Word is made flesh."

-- Leonard Cohen

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."

-Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."

--John Kenneth Galbraith

"Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good."

-- Soren Kierkegaard

"If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough."

-- Meister Eckhart

"I'm a part of Willie Nelson's world and I love it, but at the same time, I'm part of the Grateful Dead's world. One night I might be playing twin fiddles at the Broken Spoke and the next night I'll be down at Antone's playing blues. In that way Texas is a paradise, because all that music is here."

-- Doug Sahm, 1975

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

"A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them."

-- P. J. O'Rourke

"Speak when you are angry, and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret."

-- Laurence J. Peter

"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."

--Horace Mann, founder of Antioch College

"You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!"

--Rod Serling

"Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful."

-- E.F. Schumacher

"I've been looking for that particular son of a bitch for seven years. I could have been a doctor, or an architect."

--Vivian Stanshall (Bad Blood)

"The Church is her true self only when she exists for humanity. As a fresh start, she should give away all her endowments to the poor and needy. The clergy should live solely on the free-will offerings of their congregations, or possibly engage in some secular calling."

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945),
Letters and Papers from Prison

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

-- George Orwell

"Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd."

-- Edith Sitwell

"Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity."

-- Frank Leahy

"I suddenly understood with great clarity that nothing in life — except death itself — was ever going to kill me. No meeting could ever go that badly. No client would ever be that angry. No business error would ever bring me as close to the brink as I had already been."

--David E. Davis, Jr., advertising writer and magazine publisher, recounting a nearly fatal auto racing accident at age 25 that left him disfigured.