All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to human life, but foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint.

Whenever a total eclipse of the sun was visible in an accessible region parties were sent out to observe it.

In 1860 a total eclipse of the sun was visible in British America.

My father was the most rational and the most dispassionate of men.

The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington.

As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest.

Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.

We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.

Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird.

What we now call school training, the pursuit of fixed studies at stated hours under the constant guidance of a teacher, I could scarcely be said to have enjoyed.

So far as the economic condition of society and the general mode of living and thinking were concerned, I might claim to have lived in the time of the American Revolution.

The sacred transformation

The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.

We're all physical bodies, but basically everything we do is determined by what goes on in our heads. The only person who ever stops me from achieving something is me.

Thus there will be three effects of nearness to Jesus humility, happiness, and holiness.

You've got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it.

The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in.

Job creation is important I think, but it's not the critical issue for Republicans.

A "classic" is a book that everybody praises but nobody has read

Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry.