“I hate Twitter. It’s like a state surveillance agency run by gullible volunteers.” — Stewart Lee

We do not know what thoughts stirred in the mind of the last of the mastodons, but we can take it that they were nothing very remarkable. It is hardly likely that the last man will have the mind of a Goethe. He will die, and that will be the last stage of human progress.

— Anatole France, Under the Rose, 1925

“It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘always do what you are afraid to do.”” — Emerson

“Never go out to meet trouble. If you will just sit still, nine cases out of ten someone will intercept it before it reaches you.” — Calvin Coolidge

“The most delightful advantage of being bald — one can hear snowflakes.” — English magistrate R.G. Daniels, quoted in the Observer, July 11, 1976

“Reason misleads us more often than nature.” — Vauvenargues

“I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.” — Montaigne

“I always feel an optimist when I emerge from a tunnel.” — Robert Lynd

We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because ‘two’ is ‘one and one’. We forget that we have still to make a study of ‘and’.

— Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 1928