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“A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is a man who hopes they are.”
― Chauncey Mitchell Depew

“NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent. ”
― Siddharta Gautama

“People are invariably surprised to hear me say I am both an atheist and an agnostic, as if this somehow weakens my certainty. I usually reply with a question like, 'Well, are you a Republican or an American?' The two words serve different concepts and are not mutually exclusive. Agnosticism addresses knowledge; atheism addresses belief. The agnostic says, 'I don't have a knowledge that God exists.' The atheist says, 'I don't have a belief that God exists.' You can say both things at the same time. Some agnostics are atheistic and some are theistic.”
― Dan Barker, Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists

“It always seems as though the definition of love will remain debatable by an opinionated world.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“The term bohemian has a bad reputation because it's allied to myriad clichés, but Parisians originally adopted the term, associated with nomadic Gypsies, to describe artists and writers who stayed up all night and ignored the pressures of the industrial world.”
― Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World

“When your only regret is if anyone thinks you regret anything - that is the definition of conviction.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“Committee - a group of men who keep minutes and waste hours.”
― Milton Berle

“There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and its environment (outer world).”
― Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology

“paranoia, the first cousin of a bastard named fear”
― Eric Jerome Dickey, Dying for Revenge

“COOL·NESS [KOOL-NIS] -noun
CATCHING your mom gazing at the crazy crowd like she finally gets it
WATCHING your dad head-banging like he’s Finn’s twin brother
LEARNING that your new friends Tash and Kallie are a thousand times more complicated than you realized, and loving them for it
FEELING every one of your boyfriend’s pounding drumbeats, and thinking it’s the most romantic music ever written
REALIZING you’re completely unique . . . even in a crowd”
― Antony John, Five Flavors of Dumb

“Definition: 'Love' is making a shot to the knees of a target 120 kilometres away using an Aratech sniper rifle with a tri-light scope. Statement: This definition, I am told, is subject to interpretation. Obviously, 'love' is a matter of odds. Not many meatbags could make such a shot, and strangely enough, not many meatbags would derive love from it. Yet for me, love is knowing your target, putting them in your targeting reticle, and together, achieving a singular purpose... against statistically long odds...”
― HK-47

“Good communication is less about saying what you mean, and more about defining what you say.”
― Kelli Jae Baeli, ISO (In Search Of): The Art of Dating, Relationships & Sex for the Discerning Lesbian

“A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.”
― Samuel Butler, The Note Books Of Samuel Butler

“It was so silly to try to define things by words. What did one person mean by infatuation or obsession and another mean by love. The whole thing couldn't be tidied away with neat little labels." - Lena Gray”
― Maeve Binchy, The Glass Lake

“To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.”
― Alan Watts

“The real difference is this: the Christian says that he has knowledge; the Agnostic admits that he has none; and yet the Christian accuses the Agnostic of arrogance, and asks him how he has the impudence to admit the limitations of his mind. To the Agnostic every fact is a torch, and by this light, and this light only, he walks.

The Agnostic knows that the testimony of man is not sufficient to establish what is known as the miraculous. We would not believe to-day the testimony of millions to the effect that the dead had been raised. The church itself would be the first to attack such testimony. If we cannot believe those whom we know, why should we believe witnesses who have been dead thousands of years, and about whom we know nothing?

The Agnostic takes the ground that human experience is the basis of morality. Consequently, it is of no importance who wrote the gospels, or who vouched or vouches for the genuineness of the miracles. In his scheme of life these things are utterly unimportant. He is satisfied that “the miraculousâ€� is the impossible. He knows that the witnesses were wholly incapable of examining the questions involved, that credulity had possession of their minds, that 'the miraculous' was expected, that it was their daily food.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol 1: Lectures

“I looked up fairness in the dictionary and it was not there.”
― William Giraldi

“A label locks me into a definition that people use to control me. A vision graces me with an idea that serves to release me.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The boundaries of this world are forever shifting â€� from day to night, joy to sorrow, love to hate, and from life itself to death; and who can say at what moment we may suddenly cross over the border, from one state of existence to another, like heat applied to some flammable substance? I have been given my own ever-changing margins, across which I move, continually and hungrily, like a migrating animal. Now civilized, now untamed; now responsive to decency and human concern, now viciously attuned to the darkest of desires.”
― Michael Cox, The Meaning of Night

“Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments â€� the more stringent the tests, the better â€� and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely).

. . . I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. (Please note the limitation to questions of fact. I intentionally exclude from my purview questions of ethics, aesthetics, ultimate purpose, and so forth.) Thus, 'science' (as I use the term) is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers and indeed all human beings in (some aspects of) our daily lives. (Of course, the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well, or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.)”
― Alan Sokal

“In the absence of a formally agreed, worldwide dictionary definition of 'Quotography' (in 2016), here are my two cents worth: 'Quotography is the art of pairing unique quotations with complementary images in order to express thought-provoking ideas, challenging concepts, profound sentiments'.”
― Alex Morritt, Lines & Lenses

“Over the years I have had much occasion to ponder this word, the intelligentsia. We are all very fond of including ourselves in it—but you see not all of us belong. In the Soviet Union this word has acquired a completely distorted meaning. They began to classify among the intelligentsia all those who don't work (and are afraid to) with their hands. All the Party, government, military, and trade union bureaucrats have been included. All bookkeepers and accountants—the mechanical slaves of Debit. All office employees. And with even greater ease we include here all teachers (even those who are no more than talking textbooks and have neither independent knowledge nor an independent view of education). All physicians, including those capable only of making doodles on the patients' case histories. And without the slightest hesitation all those who are only in the vicinity of editorial offices, publishing houses, cinema studios, and philharmonic orchestras are included here, not even to mention those who actually get published, make films, or pull a fiddle bow.

And yet the truth is that not one of these criteria permits a person to be classified in the intelligentsia. If we do not want to lose this concept, we must not devalue it. The intellectual is not defined by professional pursuit and type of occupation. Nor are good upbringing and good family enough in themselves to produce and intellectual. An intellectual is a person whose interests in and preoccupation with the spiritual side of life are insistent and constant and not forced by external circumstances, even flying in the face of them. An intellectual is a person whose thought is nonimitative.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“We don't define the unlimited.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Globalization is not just about changing relations between the ‘insideâ€� of the nation-state and the ‘outsideâ€� of the international system. It cuts across received categories, creating myriad multilayered intersections, overlapping playing fields, and actors skilled at working across these boundaries. People are at once rooted and rootless, local producers and global consumers, threatened in their identities yet continually remaking those identities.”
― Philip G. Cerny

“Pleasureâ€� is different from “happinessâ€�. It has its own definition. Pleasure may or may not come from hard work; Pleasure may or may not come from sin; However, happiness is always divine and comes from fulfillment!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Life is both a particle and a wave, Lacey taught me, and also it's neither. But only when no one is watching. Once you measure it, it has to choose. It was the act of witnessing that turned nothing into something, collapsed possibility clouds into concrete and irrevocable truth. I'd only pretended to understand before, but I understood now: When no one was watching, I was a cloud. I was all possibilities.”
― Robin Wasserman, Girls on Fire

“It seems to me that those who claim to be 'true' and 'bible believing' Christians and yet spend all their time and energy spreading unhappiness and hatred for others - and are themselves consumed by it - are by the very definition of the term - false prophets.”
― Christina Engela, For Love of Leelah

“Like navigation markings in unknown waters, definitions of poverty need to be distinctive and unambiguous. A definition that is not precise is as bad as no definition at all.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty