"Here, like everywhere else, laughing and singing, dancing and dreaming are not exactly the whole of reality; and for one ray of sun shining on the hut, the rest of the village remains in the dark."

“Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kindly, sunshiny old age.”

“We've got this proposal which has been languishing in the legislature, the Water Legacy Act, which is derived from a Republican task force on protecting the Great Lakes. Yet nothing has been done on it.”

“Let nothing novel be introduced!”

“The larger point is this: We've invested over half a billion dollars in New York since this department was stood up. We've given New York more money, by more than double, than any other city in the country.”

“It's always better to be the dumper than the dumpee.”

“Old people who live too long come to resemble turtles. As though time turned in a curve, and down they go to the reptiles again. Not the little wet naked frog they were born. But the tortoise. Cold eyes, sagging circles of skin, the nose becomes beak. The shell of sleep.”

Source : Josephine Winslow Johnson (1996). “The Inland Island”, Writer's Digest Books

“The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It's come to the point where you almost can't run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.”

“The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.”

Source : "How We Know". Freeman Dyson's review of James Gleick's book "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" (2011), www.nybooks.com. March 10, 2011.