Bug is bug.
— Lily
But, Sir, with respect, she’s a vastly heavier ship. She’s out of our class. She could be halfway to Cape Horn by the time we’re repaired and under way.
— Sailing Master John Allen, Master and Commander
The basic particle of light, a photon, is born traveling at the speed of light, as it emerges from an atom or a molecule. A photon never knows any other speed, and we have not found another phenomenon that accelerates from zero to top speed instantaneously.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Hiding in the Light,” Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey
By acting like a man in love, he became a man in love again.
— Le mari, “Bastille," Paris, je t'aime
Benjamin is trying to tell us, in his report from the heart of the revolution, that commodities in their profusion and artful presentation can be valued as something other than commodities.
— Dean MacCannel, “The Tourist in the Urban Symbolic,” The Ethics of Sightseeing
I think that’s a fair assessment.
— Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known
And my last stroke, and I’m heading into the grave, I wonder what color it will be?
— George W. Bush, “An Ex-President, Brush in Hand, Captures His Fellow Leaders,” The New York Times
Negative progress, figuring out that what we think doesn’t really work, and that is progress of a kind.
— Martha Himmelfarb
A few feet away from us, 27 people had died.
— Mara Gordon, “Broken, Not Bound, by an Intimate Tie,” The New York Times
For all we know, if you want to see what it’s like inside a black hole, just look around you.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, “A Sky Full of Ghosts,” Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey
Even apocryphal stories get remembered in history.
— Danny
They are poles apart in feeling. But carving is a slow business, and if one works for too long a stretch upon a carving which satisfies only one side of one’s nature, one becomes restive, one tends to become absorbed by projects which have not yet been started, and one’s crowing anxiety to be done with the thing one is working on will show in some of the forms. But if there is something with a quite different content on the go at the same time there is an interplay of one’s interests.
— Henry Moore, “Sculpture in the Open Air”
It’s not our brain that can give us the answer any more. Isn’t meditation the state where answers are given to your most important questions because your mind has achieved a standstill?
— Frederick Kiesler, “Kiesler’s Pursuit of an Idea”
Never be jealous in this life Zero.
— Gustave H, The Grand Budapest Hotel
No one had to transmit it, so no one had a chance to change it.
— Martha Himmelfarb
I continue to be much more concerned, when it comes to our security, with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.
— Barack Obama
Let the breakfast be what the breakfast was.
— Gaya
In the back of your tooth
— The White Stripes, “The Denial Twist”
At first I thought it was going to be like mean girls and then it just really escalated.
— Man at intermission of Heathers: The Musical
Spanning the generations.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Standing Up in the Milky Way," Cosmos