"You could always count on people to become irrational when they imagined losing something they thought belonged to them. The illusion of scarcity was a powerful weapon when deployed correctly."

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

"What we do is more important that what we mean."

"Nothing means anything anymore. Everything is just presentation. Life is a giant spectacle."

"Privacy was funny like that; people would readily give up their own for a chance to infringe on everyone else's."

"You realize saying 'no pressure' puts me under tremendous pressure."

"It's not pollution that's causing problems in our environment. It's the impurities in the air and water."

"You should never rely on the abilities of other drivers..."

"Many people refuse to accept an irrefutable truth simply because that truth puts them in the wrong."

"You choose a thankless job, you can't be upset when nobody thanks you."

"They say 'the devil's in the details,' so lets summon the devil!"

"He knows all too well that what you usually get from patting yourself on your own back is a dislocated shoulder."

“I dated a shape-shifter once. I thought I could keep him from changing. I was wrong.”

"His aunt Louisa asked him if he had made peace with God, and he replied, 'I did not know we had ever quarreled'."

On the death and dying of Henry David Thoreau.

"Knowledge is important, but much more important is the use toward which it is put. This depends on the heart and mind of the one who uses it."

"It was a - an obstacle. A disability. An injury, not just to his brain, but to his thinking."

"People acted, in short, by projecting their desires. Well - but of course. Wasn't that the point?"

"Amazing how quickly people developed sets of habits. They could not do without them, Frank had concluded. Even his improvised life was full of them. It might be said that now he had an array of habits that he chose from, a kind of menu."

"All part of the newly secure environment as envisioned in the Homeland Security acts. That these people had chosen a Nazi title for their enterprise was presumably more a tribute to their ignorance and stupidity than to any evil intent. Nevertheless it was not reassuring."

"Every day people come to me because I've got some power, and I watch them debase themselves or go silly in some way. I see them go corrupt right before my eyes. It's depressing. It's like having the Midas touch in reverse, where everything you touch turns to shit."

"And yet why did things live? What got them through it really? What made them make all these efforts, when death lay in wait at the end for every one of them?"

"An excess of reason is itself a form of madness."

"But they are not taught to think! In fact they're taught not to think. And they are stupid to begin with."

"If you are falling off a cliff, you may as well try to fly. You’ve got nothing to lose."

"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine."

"Reason cannot pierce the armor of a stubborn ignoramus."

http://lifehacker.com/when-to-stop-trying-to-win-an-argument-1797876592

"Aw Christ Sue, what does a priest know about marriage? He's married to God. God's invisible and He's happy as long as you show up once a week to eat his son."

"Science is not a set of beliefs, Science is a set of evidence."

"I learned a lesson. Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing."

"Reality doesn't conform to your preconceived notions, so you figure it's reality's fault. Typical."

"To know and to understand are not the same thing."

"Because anyone is free to attempt anything, as long as she or he is willing to accept the consequences."

"I used to get pissed when I let a car in front of me and they didn't wave their thanks. Then I realized I wasn't doing it to get thanked, but to be a good person."

"If you care about what other people think, then you're never gonna do anything."

"You know, it's funny. When you look at someone through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags."

"I've always thought religion is most beneficial when it's taken a la carte."

"It was one thing to pretend to be respectable; it was another entirely to be respectable."

"...he did not fear death, he feared dying and believed that knowledge of the difference between the two was the true wellspring of courage."

"Believing in something in the abstract is not the same is having it dangled in front of you."

"Once he had been the kind of man who said nothing, rather than lie; but now he said everything he thought, which is not necessarily more honest."

“Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”

"The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity."

"The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."

“You can’t debate an unwilling opponent. You can’t reason with someone who makes up their own facts.”

"Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."

"You won't find happiness in life if you're looking in the wrong place."

"Because when people are desperate to believe in something, they'll believe in anything."

"That's the thing with the Internet: sure, it makes it harder to hide the truth, but it also makes it a hell of a lot easier to spread lies."

"It's easy to lie when you know you're right."

“We have competent people thinking about this stuff. We’re not just making shit up.”