Diligence and Application have their due Encouragement, even in the remotest Parts of the World, and that no Case can be so low, so despicable, or so empty of Prospect, but that an unwearied Industry will go a great way to deliver us from it, will in...
For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very precisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot ...
The damn vermin are so numerous that I am afraid to sneeze, for fear the damned lice would regard it as gong for dinner, and eat me up - Robert Cobb Kennedy
At Bow Street Magistrates' Court the essential facts were established. The man's name was James Tilly Matthews. He was a pauper of the south London parish of Camberwell. He had a wife and a young family. He appeared to be of unsound mind.
To look back before 1800 is to enter another world, one where the number of institutions for the mad was a tiny fraction of today's and what we would now call mental disorders were often understood as religious ecstasies or diabolical possessions.
Up to this point, it was rare for the mad to be distinguished from the poor, the homeless, the indigent, beggars, vagabonds, petty criminals and others who were unable to fit into society or take care of themselves. It was rare, too, that they were l...
The Air Loom, for all its florid craziness, can be seen to have a function and a rationale: as a miraculous, if temporary, fix for a breaking mind, a coping strategy for a life that had become too brutally contradictory to sustain otherwise.
For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new,unforeseeable experience with which one does not think onesel...
Intelligent Design is a remarkably uncreative theory that abandons the search for understanding at the very point where it is most needed. If Intelligent Design is really a science, then the burden is on its scientists to discover the mechanisms used...
[last lines] Benjamin Button: Some people, were born to sit by a river. Some get struck by lightning. Some have an ear for music. Some are artists. Some swim. Some know buttons. Some know Shakespeare. Some are mothers. And some people, dance.
Daisy: Would you still love me if I were old and saggy? Benjamin Button: Would you still love ME if I were young and had acne? When I'm afraid of what's under the stairs? Or if I end up wetting the bed?
Captain Mike: Why is it when you showed up you were no bigger than a pollard with one foot in the grave. Now, either I drank a hell of a lot more than I think I did, or you spry'd up. What's your secret? Benjamin Button: Well captain, you *did* drink...
Lt. Doyle: What do you say we all sit down and have a nice friendly drink too, hmm? Forget all about this. We can tell lies about the good old days during the war. Lisa: So that's it? You're through with the case? Lt. Doyle: There is no case to be so...
Sherlock Holmes: There's only at one case that intrigues me at present. The curious case of Mrs. Hudson, the absentee landlady. I've been studying her comings and goings, they appear most... sinister. Mrs. Hudson: Tea, Mr. Holmes? Sherlock Holmes: Is...
Cousin Avi: Is there gambling involved? Doug the Head: It's a boxing match, Avi, a boxing match. Cousin Avi: Did he have a case with him? Doug the Head: Yes, he had a case. Cousin Avi: And this schmuck is gambling? You're talking about Franky "I've g...
Our relationship with literary characters, at least to those that exercise a certain attraction over us, rests in fact on a denial. We know perfectly well, on a conscious level, that these characters “do not exist,” or in any case do not exist in...
An undergraduate researching the "witch hunt" cases asked for evidence that there had been more than one hundred cases, noting that the major lists of such cases added up to about fifty. There was no reply that provided documentation to support the c...
Benjamin Button: [Voice over; letter to his daughter] For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules ...
Angel: Would you give guns to someone to kill your father or your mother or your brother? Pike Bishop: Ten thousand cuts an awful lot of family ties. Angel: My people have no guns. But with guns, my people could fight! If I could take guns... I would...
In case of a thunderstorm, stand in the middle of the fairway and hold up a one iron. Not even God can hit a one iron.
Religion is love; in no case is it logic.
