Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

"The 'public' is a phantom, the phantom of an opinion supposed to exist in a vast number of persons who have no effective interrelation and though the opinion is not effectively present in the units. Such an opinion is spoken of as 'public opinion,' a fiction which is appealed to by individuals and by groups as supporting their special views. It is impalpable, illusory, transient; "'tis here, 'tis there, 'tis gone"; a nullity which can nevertheless for a moment endow the multitude with power to uplift or destroy."----Karl Jaspers

“Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.”---Tennessee Williams

“Send me out into another life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way”
― W.S. Merwin

“To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”
― Archibald MacLeish

"I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.”— Steven Wright

“The state never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”
—Kurt Vonnegut

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“The seasons are no longer what they once were,
But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,
As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along
Somehow.”― John Ashbery

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
― John Muir

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness."---Ludwig Wittgenstein

"The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."---Alexis de Tocqueville