Alan Perlis

The only constructive theory connecting neuroscience and psychology will arise from the study of software.

Michael Douglas as Andrew Shepherd, The American President

You want free speech? Let's see you acknowlege a man whose words make your blood boil, who is standing centerstage advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.

Marcus Aurelius

Learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference.

S. G. Tallentyre, The Friends of Voltaire

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand

Among those I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

Morgan Freeman as Red, The Shawshank Redemption

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

Confucious

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

Thomas Edison

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

Terry Pratchet & Neil Gaiman Good Omens

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

Dwight D. Eisenhower (in a letter to Gen. George C. Marshall, regarding The Holocaust)

The things I saw beggar description… The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the near future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’

Thelonious Monk

I don't consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can't develop any further. But I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. Take a musician like John Coltrane. He is a perfect musician, who can give expression to all the possibilities of his instrument. But he seems to have difficulty expressing original ideas on it. That is why he keeps looking for ideas in exotic places. At least I don't have that problem, because, like I say, I find my inspiration in myself.

Ulysses S. Grant

Encourage free schools and resolve that not one dollar of money appropriated to their support no matter how raised, shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school… Leave the matter of religion to the family circle, the church & the private school supported entirely by private contribution. Keep the church and state forever separate.

Kurt Cobain [In Utero (unused liner notes), 1993]

If you’re a sexist, racist, homophobe or basically an asshole, don’t buy this CD. I don’t care if you like me, I hate you.

Kurt Cobain [Incesticide (liner notes), 1992]

If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records.

J.R.R. Tolkien

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.