A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, "You are mad; you are not like us."
▪ St. Anthony the Great

On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
▪ Charles Babbage

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.
▪ Winston Churchill

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
▪ Rick Cook

An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity [...] for an idiot anything the more complicated it is the more he will admire it, if you make something so clusterfucked he can't understand it he's gonna think you're a god.
▪ Terry Davis

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
▪ Philip K. Dick

One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is to escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.
▪ Albert Einstein

It's like asking, why is Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.
▪ Paul Erdős

Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal.
▪ Ernest Hemingway

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
▪ Rudyard Kipling

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
▪ John Stuart Mill

If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labour passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures.
▪ Musonius Rufus

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
▪ Edward Snowden

It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
▪ Socrates

The unexamined life is not worth living.
▪ Socrates

All generalizations are false, including this one.
▪ Mark Twain

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
▪ Oscar Wilde