"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."
H. L. Mencken
"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
Oscar Wilde
"The history of the race, and each individual's experience, are thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal."
Mark Twain
"A socialist is somebody who doesn't have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody."
George Bernard Shaw
"It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see."
Flannery O'Connor
"Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom."
General George Patton
"Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared."
J. K. Rowling
"Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to the future generation."
George Bernard Shaw
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
Albert Einstein
"It is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!"
Robert Louis Stevenson
"All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer."
IBM maintenance manual, 1925