“Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me!” — Pete Conrad, after becoming the third human to set foot on the moon
“There is but one art — to omit! O if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.” — Robert Louis Stevenson, letter to a cousin, Oct. 30, 1883
“A little boy and a little girl were looking at a picture of Adam and Eve. ‘Which is Adam and which is Eve?’ said one. ‘I do not know,’ said the other, ‘but I could tell if they had their clothes on.'” — Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912
“If I were going to construct a God I would furnish Him with some ways and qualities and characteristics which the Present (Bible) One lacks. … He would spend some of His eternities in trying to forgive Himself for making man unhappy when He could have made him happy with the same effort and He would spend the rest of them in studying astronomy.” — Mark Twain
“Belief in progress doesn’t mean belief in progress that has already occurred. That would not require belief.” — Kafka
“It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.” — Plutarch
“He who boasts of his ancestry praises the merits of another.” — Seneca
“A man who makes boast of his ancestors doth but advertise his own insignificance.” — Benjamin Franklin
“The man who has not anything to boast of but his illustrious ancestors is like a potato — the only good belonging to him is under ground.” — Sir Thomas Overbury
“When we go up to the shelves in the reading-room of the British Museum, how like it is to wasps flying up and down an apricot tree that is trained against a wall, or cattle coming down to drink at a pool!” — Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912
“The difference between the amoeba and Einstein is that, although both make use of the method of trial and error elimination, the amoeba dislikes erring while Einstein is intrigued by it.” — Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, 1972
“The only way to keep ahead of the procession is to experiment. If you don’t, the other fellow will. When there’s no experimenting there’s no progress. Stop experimenting and you go backward. If anything goes wrong, experiment until you get to the very bottom of the trouble.” — Thomas Edison
“I wonder … that a soothsayer doesn’t laugh when he sees another soothsayer.” — Cicero