"He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." – Critic H. L. Mencken, on the inaugural address of Warren G. Harding (June 23, 2009)
"A posteriori, through experience, [man] finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns...." – Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (March 092008)
"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." – Carl Gustav Jung (February 252008)
"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead." – Bertrand Russell (January 252007)
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed." – Carl Jung (December 162006)
"Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real." – Iris Murdoch (December 152006)
"Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer." – Dave Barry (October 212006)
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." – Arthur Schopenhauer (August 122006)
"The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous." – Margot Fonteyn (February 232006)
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction." – E. F. Schumacher (February 102006)
"Politics are like sausage: nobody wants to know how it's made, and it'll eventually destroy your heart." – Stephen Colbert (January 102006)
"One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn't pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself." – Lucille Ball (January 52006)
"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into." – Jonathan Swift (March 252005)
"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad." – Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson (8 December2004)