“fainting: /v./ Mother Natures way of telling you to lie down. Which you will then do, whether you want to or not.”
—

“glitter: /n./ The Herpes of the craft world.”
—

“How long a minute is depends upon which side of the bathroom door you're on.”
—

“LORD, grant me the serenity to accept stupid people as they are, courage to maintain my self-control and wisdom to know that if I act on it, I will go to jail.”
—

“multitasking: /v./ Screwing up several things at once.
—

“Next best to knowing something is to know where you read it.”
—

“nurse: /n./ The first person you see after saying 'Hey, hold my beer and watch this!'”
—

“Sadly, everything Communism said about itself was a lie.
Even more sadly, everything Communism said about Capitalism was the truth.”
—

“troll: /n./ The street bums of the internet.”
—

“vexatious litigant: /n./ An irredeemable pest in the eyes of the court.”
—

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away, if you hit him…”
—

“NOTE! This answer may contain traces of irony. Individuals allergic to humor are asked to ignore and scroll on.”
—

“When men refer to themselves as “alpha males”, I hear that in the context of software, where alpha versions are unstable, missing important features, filled with flaws, and not fit for the public.”
—

“Go … where?
Steve, this is important… Go where?
That's right… Go where?
What happened in your room… Are you listening?
What happened in your room is not an isolated incident,
it is something that is happening everywhere to everyone…
So… Where you gonna go, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide?
Nowhere… 'cause there's no one like you left.”
— Carol Malone

“Excellent question. Though I wouldn't call it a war exactly — that suggests both sides stand an equal chance of winning.”
— Emma Frost

“Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare - Chicago? Los Angeles? Miami, Florida? Vincennes, Indiana? Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there's hate, where there's prejudice, where there's bigotry. He's alive. He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He's alive because through these things we keep him alive.”
— Episode ”He's Alive“

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
— Master Yoda

“A knight is sworn to valour. His heart knows only virtue. His blade defends the helpless. His might upholds the weak. His word speaks only truth. His wrath undoes the wicked.”

“The truth is, these aren’t very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
— Deep Throat

“Some people lose their faith because Heaven shows them too little. But how many people lose their faith because Heaven showed them too much?”
— Thomas Daggett

“Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.”
— Ambassador Kosh Naranek

“We are Rangers.
We walk in the dark places no others will enter.
We stand on the bridge, and no one may pass.
We engage in battle, we do not retreat.
We live for the One, we die for the One.”
— Anla'Shok/Ranger Creed

“In the past we had little to do with other races. Evolution teaches us that we must fight that which is different in order secure land, food, and mates for ourselves, but we must reach a point when the nobility of intellect asserts itself and says: No. We need not be afraid of those who are different, we can embrace that difference and learn from it.”
— G'Kar, “The Ragged Edge” [S05E12]

I believe that when we leave a place, part of it goes with us and part of us remains. Go anywhere in the station, when it is quiet, and just listen. After a while, you will hear the echoes of all our conversations, every thought and word we’ve exchanged. Long after we are gone, our voices will linger in these walls for as long as this place remains. But I will admit that the part of me that is going will very much miss the part of you that is staying.
— G'Kar, “Objects in Motion” [S05E20]

“G'Quan wrote, «There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope. The death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.» The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born … in pain.”
— G'Kar, “Z'ha'dum” [S03E22]

“Fighting a war is easy. Destroying is easy. Building a new world out of what’s left of the old, that is what’s hard.”
— Delenn, “Lines of Communication” [S04E11]

“Every day, here and at home, we are warned about the enemy. But who is the enemy? Is it the alien? Well, we are all alien to one another. Is it the one who believes differently than we do? No, oh no, my friends. The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who tells you that you must hate that which is different. Because, in the end, that hate will turn on you. And that same hate will destroy you.”
— Rev. Will Dexter, “And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place” [S03E20]

“This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.”
— Admiral Josh Painter

“I had a great summation all worked out, full of some sharp lawyering, but I'm not going to read it. I'm here to apologize. I am young, and I am inexperienced. But you cannot hold Carl Lee Hailey responsible for my shortcomings. Do you see, in all this legal maneuvering, something has gotten lost. That something is the truth. Now, it is incumbent upon us lawyers not to just talk about the truth but to actually seek it, to find it, to live it. My teacher taught me that. Let's take Dr. Bass, for example. I would have never knowingly put a convicted felon on the stand. I hope you can believe that. But what is the truth? That, that he's a disgraced liar? What if I told you that the woman he was accused of raping was 17, he was 23, that she later became his wife, bore his child and is still married to the man today? Does that make his testimony more or less true? What is it in us that seeks the truth? Is it our minds, or is it our hearts?

I set out to prove a black man could receive a fair trial in the South, that we are all equal in the eyes of the law. That's not the truth 'cause the eyes of the law are human eyes, yours and mine, and until we can see each other as equals, justice is never going to be even-handed. It will remain nothing more than a reflection of our own prejudices. So until that day, we have a duty under God to seek the truth - not with our eyes, and not with our minds where fear and hate turn commonality into prejudice, but with our hearts - but we don't know better.

I want to tell you a story. I'm going to ask you all to close your eyes while I tell you the story. I want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to yourselves. Go ahead. Close your eyes, please. This is a story about a little girl walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon. I want you to picture this little girl. Suddenly a truck races up. Two men jump out and grab her. They drag her into a nearby field and they tie her up and they rip her clothes from her body. Now they climb on. First one, then the other, raping her, shattering everything innocent and pure with a vicious thrust in a fog of drunken breath and sweat. And when they're done, after they've killed her tiny womb, murdered any chance for her to bear children, to have life beyond her own, they decided to use her for target practice. They start throwin' full beer cans at her. They throw them so hard that it tears the flesh all the way to her bones. Then they urinate on her. Now comes the hanging. They have a rope. They tie a noose. Imagine the noose going tight around her neck and with a sudden blinding jerk, she's pulled into the air and her feet and legs go kicking. They don't find the ground. The hanging branch isn't strong enough. It snaps and she falls back to the earth. So they pick her up, throw her in the back of the truck and drive out to Foggy Creek Bridge. Pitch her over the edge. And she drops some thirty feet down to the creek bottom below. Can you see her? Her raped, beaten, broken body soaked in their urine, soaked in their semen, soaked in her blood, left to die. Can you see her? I want you to picture that little girl.

Now imagine she's white.”
— Jake Tyler Brigance

“Fear is just a feeling. You feel hot. You feel hungry. You feel angry. You feel afraid. Fear can never kill you.”
— Chiun

“You move like a pregnant yak. Sit.”
— Chiun

“You're going to be the Eleventh Commandment: 'Thou shalt not get away with it.'”
— Conn MacCleary

“Remember, perfection is a road, not a destination.”
— Chiun

“Not to know is bad;
Not to wish to know is worse.”

“If you have much, give of your wealth.
If you have little, give of your heart.”

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always evil men.
[…]
There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies its holder.”

Thomas Aquinas [*1225-01-28 †1274-03-07], also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican friar and priest and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism.

“Man should not consider his material possession his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need.”

“Beware of the person of one book.”

“Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them.”

“The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”

James A. "Jim" Baldwin [*1886-05-26 †1962-08-02] was an American football player, track athlete, coach of football, basketball, and baseball, and college athletics administrator.

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once the hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
—

“Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?”
— The Great Challenge

“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie1 of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade — which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to 'How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?' is 'Go fuck yourself,' because you can't directly relate any of those quantities.”
— Wild Thing

“Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference.”
— Vignette

Leonidas Frank "Lon" Chaney Sr [*1883-04-01 †1930-08-26] was an American stage and film actor, director and screenwriter. He is regarded as one of the most versatile and powerful actors of early cinema, renowned for his characterizations of tortured, often grotesque and afflicted characters, and his groundbreaking artistry with makeup.

“There is nothing funny about a clown by moonlight.”

Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower [*1890-10-14 †1969-03-28] was an American Army general and statesman who served as the 34^th President of the United States from 1953 to 1961.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

Ian Lancaster Fleming [*1908-05-28 †1964-08-12] was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer who is best known for his James Bond series of spy novels.

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it’s enemy action.”
– Goldfinger (1959)

Benjamin Franklin [*1706-01-17 †1790-04-17] was an American inventor, journalist, printer, diplomat, and statesman.

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

“The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common.
They don't alter their views to fit the facts.
They alter the facts to fit their views.
Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”
— The Face of Evil [14.4]

“In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.”
— The Character of Physical Law (1965), Ch. 7, “Seeking New Laws”

Galileo Galilei

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.”

Ross Garnaut [∗1946-07-28]

“If you ignore the science when building a bridge, the bridge collapses.
If you ignore the science when building a plane, the plane crashes.”

“A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.”

Barry Goldwater [*1909-01-01†1998-05-29] was an American politician. He was a U.S. Senator from Arizona, and the Republican Party's nominee for President in the 1964 election.

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”
— Said in 1994 according to John Deans “Conservatives without conscience” (2006)

Fredrick Allen Hampton [★1948-08-30†1969-12-04] was an American activist and revolutionary socialist. He came to prominence in Chicago as chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and deputy chairman of the national BPP. In this capacity, he founded the Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that initially included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots and the Young Lords, and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change.

“We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.”
— Fred Hampton on Solidarity

Christian Johann Heinrich Heine [★1797-12-13 †1856-02-17] was a journalist, an essayist, and one of the most significant German romantic poets. Jewish by birth, he converted to Christianity as an adult.

“Wherever they burn books, in the end will also burn human beings.”
— Almansor: A Tragedy (1823)

“Whenever any government, or any church, or anyone else for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects: 'This book you may not read, this film you may not watch, this image you may not see, this knowledge you may not have', then the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives.”
— “If this goes on…“

Frank Herbert [*1920-10-08 †1986-02-11] was a critically acclaimed and commercially successful American science fiction author.

“Do not depend only on theory if your life is at stake.”
— Bene Gesserit Commentary

“When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong — faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.”
—

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”
—

“Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”
—

“A person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing you to grow. Without them, it sleeps- seldom to awaken. The sleeper must awaken.”
—

“One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.”
—

“Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.”
—

“Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. Something cannot emerge from nothing.”
—

“Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane”
— Dune Genesis (1980)

“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.”
— Litany Against Fear

“The mind can go either direction under stress — toward positive or toward negative: on or off.
Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end.
The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.”

“It is so shocking to find out how many people do not believe that they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.”

“Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class – whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.”

“Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself – a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.”

“Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.”

Eric Hoffer [*1902-07-251 †1983-05-21] was an American writer on social and political philosophy.

“What starts out [here] as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.”
— The Temper of Our Time (1967)

“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated”
— Opening address for the United States prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials, 1945-11-21

“There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternative, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.”
— Speech supposed to be delivered the day he was assassinated

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
—

Martin Luther King Jr [*1929-01-15 †1968-04-04] was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement.

“All I'm saying is simply this, that all life is interrelated, that somehow we're caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
— Letter From a Birmingham Jail.

“Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”
—

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society, to a 'people-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
—

“On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
—

“You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.”
— Speech to his staff, 1966.

“You can safely assume that you've created god in your own image when it turns out that god hates all the same people you do.”

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country… . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
— Letter to Col. William F. Elkins, 1864-11-12. (Source)

“The very pre-ponderance of passionately pious men in the colony was virtually an assurance of unnatural crime; insomuch as psychology now proves the religious instinct to be a form of transmuted eroticism precisely parallel to the transmutations in other directions which respectively produce such things as sadism, hallucination, melancholia, and other mental morbidities. Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.”
— Letter to Robert E. Howard, 1930-10-04. (Source)

Michael Evan Mann [*1965-12-28] is an American climatologist and geophysicist, who has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change, and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.

“Dreams of slowly adapting to climate change will have to be replaced with the hard reality of an ever-escalating pace of disruption and unpredictability”
—The Madhouse Effect

Craig Mazin [*1971-04-08] is an American screenwriter and film director. He is known for writing Identity Thief, The Hangover Part II, The Hangover Part III, and The Huntsman: Winter's War. He created and wrote a five-part miniseries for HBO and Sky based on the Chernobyl disaster.

“What is the cost of lies?
It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth.
The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.
What can we do then?”
– HBO's “Chernobyl”, E01 (“1:23:45”) [not attributable to Valery Legasov]

“We're on dangerous ground right now, because of our secrets and our lies.
They're practically what define us.
When the truth offends, we—we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there.
But it is…still there.
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth.
Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
– HBO's “Chernobyl”, E05 (“Vichnaya Pamyat”)

“To be a scientist is to be naive.
We are so focused on our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it.
But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not.
The truth doesn't care about our needs or wants.
It doesn't care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions.
It will lie in wait for all time.”
– HBO's “Chernobyl”, E05 (“Vichnaya Pamyat”)

“It's the cost of lies.
When people choose to lie, and when everyone engages in a very passive conspiracy to promote the lie, we can get away with it for a very long time.
But the truth just doesn't care.
And it will get you.”
– “The Chernobyl Podcast” (in connection with HBO's 2019 Miniseries “Chernobyl”)

“The lesson of Chernobyl isn't that modern nuclear power is dangerous.
The lesson is that lying, arrogance and suppression of criticism is dangerous.

The flaws that led to Chernobyl are the same flaws shown by climate change deniers today.”
– Tweet on 2019-04-08T08:14

“Yes, there is a conspiracy, indeed there are a great number of conspiracies, all tripping each other up … the main thing that I learned about conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in the conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control, the truth is far more frightening; no-one is in control, the world is rudderless.”

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

“We talk about cost—we’re going to pay for this whether we pass a Green New Deal or not. Because as towns and cities go underwater, as wildfires ravage our communities, we’re going to pay. And we have to decide whether we’re going to pay to react, or pay to be proactive.”
— 2019-03-26 *

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
— 1984

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

[*27 †66 C.E.] Roman writer of the Neronian age; he was a noted satirist. He is identified with C. Petronius Arbiter, but the manuscript text of the Satyricon calls him Titus Petronius. Satyricon is his sole surviving work.

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed.
I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”
— On Reorganization

Thomas Paine [*1737-02-09/01-29¹ †1809-06-08] was an English-American political activist, author, political theorist and revolutionary.
¹: 02-09 Gregorian/01-29 Julian.

“I view things as they are, without regard to place or person;
my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”

Plutarch

“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”

“There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kids life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.”

— On Ayn Rand's “Atlas Shrugged” Source

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (/ˈroʊzəvəlt/, his own pronunciation, or /ˈroʊzəvɛlt/) [*1882-01-30†1945-04-12], commonly known by his initials FDR, was an American statesman and political leader who served as the 32nd President of the United States.

“I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
— November 4, 1938

J. Michael Straczynski [*1954-07-14] is an American television and film screenwriter, producer and director, and comic book writer. He is the founder of Studio JMS, and is best known as the creator of the science fiction television series Babylon 5 (1993–1998) and its spinoff Crusade (1999), as well as the series Jeremiah (2002–2004), and Sense8 (2015–2018).

“We have an obligation to one another, responsibilities and trusts. That does not mean we must be pigeons, that we must be exploited. But it does mean that we should look out for one another when and as much as we can; and that we have a personal responsibility for our behavior; and that our behavior has consequences of a very real and profound nature. We are not powerless. We have tremendous potential for good or ill. How we choose to use that power is up to us; but first we must choose to use it. We're told every day, “You can't change the world.” But the world is changing every day. Only question is … who's doing it? You or somebody else?”
— At The Midpoint (Spoilers for everything), 1995-04-07 [rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated]

“A good story should provoke discussion, debate and the occasional bar fight.”

“Even Zathras say, Braves suck.”
— Compuserve, 1997.

“They told us not to wish in the first place, not to aspire, not to try; to be quiet, to play nice, to shoot low and aspire not at all. They are always wrong. Follow your dreams. Make your wishes. Create the future. And above all, believe in yourself. That is the lesson of Babylon 5.”
— Babylon 5 Calendar, 1998

“The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.”
—
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us.”

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (/ˈsɑːrtrə/, US also /ˈsɑːrt/;[7] French: [saʁtʁ];) [★1905-06-21†1980-04-15] was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines.

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

“The person who calls for hell fire on others calls for it on them-self. The extent of your mercy may be the extent of mercy extended to you.”

— Tweet on 2014-07-28T16:56+0200

“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

— Questioned

Neil deGrasse Tyson [*1958-10-05] is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Since 1996, he has been the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003.

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”

François-Marie Arouet [★1694-11-21†1778-05-30], most famous under his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer, deist and philosopher.

Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life. In days gone by, there were people who said to us: “You believe in incomprehensible, contradictory and impossible things because we have commanded you to; now then, commit unjust acts because we likewise order you to do so.” Nothing could be more convincing. Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil. Once a single faculty of your soul has been tyrannized, all the other faculties will submit to the same fate. This has been the cause of all the religious crimes that have flooded the earth.
— Questions sur les miracles (1765)
(Translation from Norman Lewis Torrey: Les Philosophes. The Philosophers of the Enlightenment and Modern Democracy. Capricorn Books, 1961, pp. 277-8)
Widely used paraphrase: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities”.

“I swear, I am increasingly convinced that at least half of America is completely bonkers. And by bonkers I mean crazy. Looney Tunes. Starkers. The kind of bat-shit, drooling, bug-eyed, barking at the moon, piss-drinking, smeared in their own excrement, self-mutilating insanity you get from eating a steady diet of lead paint chips and snorting Tester’s Model Cement straight from the tap.”

“Irony jumps the tracks, careens down the embankment, crashes through a circus, hurdles over a mink farm, and plows into the river where it catches fire, rolls over, and explodes raining down burning weasels and flaming clown shrapnel across the countryside.”
– Tweet on 2021-05-30T23:14Z

“The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.”
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