Life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it. — Oscar Wilde

"Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood."

"The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."

"A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. [Answering the question, what is a cynic?]"

"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."

"we are engaged in a grim experiment never before attempted. We are subjecting whole populations to exposure to chemicals which animal experiments have proved to be extremely poisonous and in many cases cumulative in their effect. These exposures now begin at or before birth and-unless we change our methods-will continue through the lifetime of those now living. No one knows what the result will be, because we have no previous experience to guide us."

"pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness"

"I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought."

"“We need brains, is the bottom line,” Ivy said. “We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We’re all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn’t bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It’s our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”"

"I have been clinically depressed for most of my life. I once used drugs to fix it. Then I stopped. I stopped because I decided they were making me stupid, and Id rather be miserable than stupid. I am what I am."