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"No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical."

~Niels Bohr
physicist

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life — so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."

~M. Cartmill

"My mother always did say I could get more with a kind word and a 2x4 than with just a kind word."

"Babylon 5"

"You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe."

to Dr. Franklin on "Babylon 5: A Late Delivery from Avalon"

~Marcus Cole

"As long as I am able to work I must not and will not complain, because work is the only thing which gives substance to life."

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by the age eighteen."

"What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world."

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."

"The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly."

"There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

"The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

"The environment is everything that isn't me."

"Insofar as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain. And insofar as they are certain, they do not apply to reality."

"It is a miracle curiosity survives formal education."

"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible."

"Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

"Originality is only undetected plagarism."

"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts."

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

when asked to describe radio

~Albert Einstein
physicist (1879—1955)

"Physics is like sex: sure it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."

~Richard Feynman
physicist

"Like most sensible decisions, this is very painful."

"Daily Illuminator", 1 July 2002

~Steve Jackson
roleplaying game designer

"Unfortunately, we are not afforded the luxury of choosing who we fall in love with."

"Star Trek: DS9"

~General Martok

"Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they do?"

~Linus Torvalds
designer of Linux

"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough."

"As the Apostle Paul so succinctly put it, 'All things are possible, but not all things are expedient'."

~Larry Wall
designer of Perl

"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion."

~Steven Weinberg
physicist

"And so no force however great can stretch a cord however fine into an horizontal line that shall be absolutely straight."

"Elementary Treatise on Mechanics" (1819)

~William Whewell

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