"I think it's the snack food industry that's really pushing the ***** legalization issue in California."

“I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism.”

Source : Herbert Croly (2005). “The Promise of American Life”, p.5, Cosimo, Inc.

“Psychiatrists are usually very well imbued with the clinical role, where helping the sick person is the goal. And that's quite incompatible with the truthseeking role. That's probably true of the other fields, too, but maybe more so of the personalities that gravitate toward psychiatry. They tend to care about people and wish to be helpful.”

“Keep doing what you love to the best of your ability. Stop judging and get out of your own way.”

“Local innovation and initiative can help us better understand how to protect our environment.”

Source : "The Complete Gale Norton Interview". Interview with Alex Pasquariello, www.hcn.org. May 24, 2004.

“The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive ... but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.”

“I tried to think but nothing happened!”

“In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn't there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.”

Source : Alan Lightman (2014). “The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew”, p.5, Vintage

“There is a charm in making a stew, to the unaccustomed cook, from the excitement of wondering what the result will be, and whether any flavour save that of onions will survive the competition in the mixture.”