Laic Quotes & Sayings

In England every man you meet is some man's son; in America, he may be some man's father. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts these phantasms above sense, truth and justice; and she is almost always a failure in business, for business, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and rogueries that her sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it. — H.L. Mencken

Life seemed too calm; people looked for unhappiness in art as one might look for a raw material in short supply. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Smash creative blocks. Change the problem or sneak up on it from a different direction. Try something fresh - a new way with an old theme, a different point of view, unusual tool. — Nita Leland

You stick to the script, the script is Bible. — Jennifer Garner

In Ferdydurke, Gombrowicz got at the fundamental shift that occurred during the twentieth century: until then mankind was divided in two--those who defended the status quo and those who sought to change it. Then the acceleration of History took effect: whereas in the past man had lived continuously in the same setting, in a society that changed only very slowly, now the moment arrived when he suddenly began to feel History moving beneath his feet, like a rolling sidewalk: the status quo was in motion! All at once, being comfortable with the status quo was the same thing as being comfortable with History on the move! Which meant that a person could be both progressive and conformist, conservative and rebel, at the same time! — Milan Kundera

The most superior of scientific goals is to embrace a maximum of experiment with a minimum of hypotheses. — Albert Einstein

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion. — Haruki Murakami

I merely feel emptyness. A hollow of dead brush where flowers use to bloom. — Suzanne Collins

The Italian mafia, they're very [into] construction. They're in a whole different way of operating than they did back in the '20s. — Robert Loggia

When we broke the surface again the first thing I saw was the great bold stripe of the Milky Way painted across the heavens, and it occurred to me that together the fish and the stars formed a complete system, coincident parts of some ancient and mysterious whole. — Ransom Riggs

But in the end you cannot serve two masters, Theos and Elohim, the god of the Greco-Roman philosophers and Caesars and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the violent god of profit proclaimed by the empire and the compassionate God of justice proclaimed by the prophets. You can try to hybridize them and compromise them for centuries, but like oil and water they eventually separate and prove incompatible. They refuse to alloy. They produce irreconcilable narratives and create different worlds. — Brian D. McLaren

[On the practical applications of particle physics research with the Large Hadron Collider.]
Sometimes the public says, 'What's in it for Numero Uno? Am I going to get better television reception? Am I going to get better Internet reception?' Well, in some sense, yeah ... All the wonders of quantum physics were learned basically from looking at atom-smasher technology ... But let me let you in on a secret: We physicists are not driven to do this because of better color television ... That's a spin-off. We do this because we want to understand our role and our place in the universe. — Michio Kaku