“It has always puzzled me that so many religious people have taken it for granted that God favors those who believe in him. Isn’t it possible that the actual God is a scientific God who has little patience with beliefs founded on faith rather than evidence?” — Raymond Smullyan

Maxims of Theodore Roosevelt:

• A bad man of ability is worse than a bad man of no ability.
• It is almost as irritating to be patronized as to be wronged.
• Timid endurance of wrongdoing may often be to commit one of the greatest evils that one can possibly commit against one’s fellows.
• The lives of truest heroism are those in which there are no great deeds to look back upon. It is the little things well done that go to make up a successful and truly good life.
• Our system of government is the best in the world for a people able to carry it on. Only the highest type of people can carry it on.
• No one ought to submit to being imposed upon, but before you act always stop to consider the rights of others before standing up for your own.
• The wicked who prosper are never a pleasant sight.
• It is hard to fail; but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.
• Don’t let practical politics mean foul politics.
• For almost every gain there is a penalty.
• There is grave danger in attempting to establish invariable rules.
• Woe to all of us if ever as a people we grow to condone evil because it is successful.
• Remember that the shots that count in war are the ones that hit.
• What every man needs is robust virtue, that will enable him to go out into the world and remain true to himself.
• Capacity for work is absolutely necessary, and no man can be said to live in the true sense of the word if he does not work.
• In doing your work in the great world, it is a safe plan to follow a rule I once heard preached on the football field: Don’t flinch; don’t fall; hit the the line hard.

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“It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.” — Aristotle

“Music is the pleasure the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.” — Leibniz

“The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.” — Cocteau

“All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.” — Thelonious Monk

“The Eiffel Tower is the Empire State Building after taxes.” — Anonymous

“The not distinguishing where things should be distinguished, and the not confounding where things should be confounded, is the cause of all the mistakes in the world.” — John Selden

“Shun the inquisitive person, for he is also a talker.” — Horace

“The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.” — Bertrand Russell

“Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.” — John Kenneth Galbraith