"It was considered very bad form to wish authors on their birthdays 'many happy returns."

“To the efficacy and permanency of your union a government for the whole is indispensable.”

“In every remodelling of the present, the existing condition of things must be supplanted by a new one. Now every variety of circumstances in which men find themselves, every object which surrounds them, communicates a definite form and impress to their internal nature. This form is not such that it can change and adapt itself to any other a man may choose to receive; and the end is foiled, while the power is destroyed, when we attempt to impose upon that which is already stamped in the soul a form which disagrees with it.”

“I firmly believe that IBM's size can be used to its advantage.”

“The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.”

Source : "On Medicine". Essay by Avicenna (circa 1020), as quoted in "The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East" edited by Charles F. Horne (Volume VI "Medieval Arabia", pp. 90-91), sourcebooks.fordham.edu. 1917.

“When you are following me on Twitter, you are literally following my life. I think that's pretty cool.”

“Reason is universal because no attempted challenge to its results can avoid appealing to reason in the end-by claiming, for example, that what was presented as an argument is really a rationalization. This can undermine our confidence in the original method or practice only by giving us reasons to believe something else, so that finally we have to think about the arguments to make up our minds.”

“It was one of those happy days that God grants us sometimes on earth to give us an idea of the bliss of heaven.”

Source : Johann David Wyss, Isabelle de Montolieu (1871). “The Swiss Family Robinson: Or, Adventures in a Desert Island. Six Coloured Engravings on Steel”, p.246

“To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.”