He [Paolo Sarpi] was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour.

The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God.

The establishment of Christianity . . . arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years.

I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind.

The last struggles of a great superstition are very frequently the worst.

Carlyle uttered a pregnant truth when he said that the history of any country is in the biographies of the men who made it.

[Cornell University will be] an asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion.

I don't know how, or whether it is even possible to predict what the world will look like the next day. I simply have to close my eyes, and wait until tomorrow in order to find out.

Some trees grow straight, while others grow gnarled and twisted. Yet none are imperfect. Perfection is merely a perception.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

I've got the opportunity of a lifetime. Some great things are happening because of momentum and I'm just trying to seize the moment.

But life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.

I always just wanted to be a movie actress, like Lily Tomlin or Ruth Gordon. I just imagined myself being in a movie, wearing stylish women's clothing the way I saw Amy Irving wearing it.

Religion is, in fact, the dominion of the soul; it is the hope, the anchor of safety, the deliverance from evil. What a service has Christianity rendered to humanity!

I don't for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms, Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else.

Absence, like death, sets a seal on the image of those we love: we cannot realize the intervening changes which time may have effected.

Take it from me: no matter how few or how many children you have, or how little or how much money you make, your expenses are going to exceed your income by approximately a hundred dollars a month.