These are some of my favorite quotes and sayings from assorted people and places. There's a little of everything here and some are more memorable than others. Not all are serious, some just amused me. Enjoy!

I am an artist; and should be exempt from shit.
- P.J. Proby

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
- Mark Twain

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider God-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
- Aristotle

I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
- George Carlin

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.
- Demosthenes

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Albert Einstein

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.
- T. S. Eliot

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.
- Voltaire

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
- Stephen Jay Gould

I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.
- Dave Barry

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
- Euripides

It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think I'm wrong. The number of people who thought Hitler was right did not make him right... Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?
- Frank Zappa

It doesn't make a difference what temperature a room is, it's always room temperature.
- Steven Wright

From time to time, you will make mistakes. They're inevitable. Sometimes those mistakes will be...huge. What matters is that you learn from them. There's nothing wrong with falling down, so long as you end up just two inches taller when you pick yourself up off the floor. At times, you may end up far away from home. You may not be sure of where you belong anymore. But home is always there. Because home is not a place. It's wherever your passion takes you. As you continue on your path...you will lose some friends and gain new ones. The process is painful, but often necessary. They will change, and you will change because life is change. From time to time...they must find their own way, and that way may not be yours. Enjoy them for what they are. And remember them for what they were.
I really do believe that sooner or later, no matter what happens...things do work out. Oh, we have hard times. We suffer. We lose loved ones. The road is never easy. It was never meant to be easy. But in the long run...if you stay true to what you believe, things do work out. Always be willing to fight for what you believe in. It doesn't matter if 1000 people agree with you or one person agrees with you. It doesn't matter if you stand completely alone. Fight for what you believe in.
- from "Babylon 5: Objects at Rest"

There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.
- George Orwell

I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more had I been understood.
- Clarence Darrow

The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
- Harlan Ellison

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
- Plato

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
- Thomas Jefferson

Religion convinced the world that there's an invisible man in the sky who watches everything you do. And there's 10 things he doesn't want you to do or else you'll go to a burning place with a lake of fire until the end of eternity. But he loves you! ...And he needs money! He's all powerful, but he can't handle money!
- George Carlin

Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.
- Socrates

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
- Mark Twain

Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent.
- Robert Heinlein, "The Notebook of Lazarus Long"

Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.
- Charles Schulz

...You have let them distract you. Blind you with hate. You cannot see the battle for what it is. We are fighting to save one another, we must realize we are not alone. We rise and fall together. And some of us must be sacrificed if all are to be saved. Because, if we fail in this, then none of us will be saved.
- from "Babylon 5: Dust to Dust"

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
- Dorothy Parker

We read to know we are not alone.
- from "Shadowlands"

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
- Theodore Roosevelt

...This is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate.
- from "Mother Night", Kurt Vonnegut

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
- Hermann Hesse

The question is not 'is there life after death?' The question is, "is there life before death?"
-unknown

Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and star.
- Confucius

I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it.
- George Carlin

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause and to wonder and stand wrapt in awe, is as good as dead.
- Albert Einstein

People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
- Edmund Burke

It is precisely because it is fashionable for Americans to know no science, even though they may be well educated otherwise, that they so easily fall prey to nonsense.
They thus become part of the armies of the night, the purveyors of nitwittery, the retailers of intellectual junk food, the feeders on mental cardboard, for their ignorance keeps them from distinguishing nectar from sewage.
- Isaac Asimov, "The Armies of the Night"

Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.
- Robert Heinlein, "The Notebook of Lazarus Long"

Babylon 5 was the last of the Babylon stations. There would never be another. It changed the future, and it changed us. It taught us that we have to create the future, or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have to care for one another, because if we don't, who will? And that true strength sometimes comes from the most unlikely places. Mostly though, I think it gave us hope that there can always be new beginnings...even for people like us.
- from "Babylon 5: Sleeping in Light"

Never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.
- Milton

Happy are those who dream dreams and are willing to pay the price to make them come true.
- L.J., Cardinal Suenans

There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.
The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of revelation. No-one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.
- from "Babylon 5: Z'ha'dum"

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
- Benjamin Franklin

The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
- Benjamin Disraeli

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.
- Harlan Ellison

Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
- Robert Heinlein, "The Notebook of Lazarus Long"

The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.
- Thomas Paine

Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you; fear not your friends, for they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent, who permit the killers and betrayers to walk safely on the earth.
- Edward Yashinsky

The universe puts us in places where we can learn. They are never easy places, But they are right. Wherever we are is the right place at the right time. Pain that sometimes comes as part of the process of constantly being born.
- "Babylon 5: A Distant Star"

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
- Martin Luther King Jr.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every man has a right to knock him down for it.
- Dr. Samuel Johnson

If the primates that we came from had known that someday politicians would come out of the gene pool, they'd have stayed up in the trees and written evolution off as a bad idea. Hell, I always thought the opposable thumb was overrated.
- "Babylon 5: A Distant Star"

The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens have ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.
- Robert Heinlein, "The Notebook of Lazarus Long"

You are not alone. We are all the same, all in this fragile skin, suffering the ugliness of simply being human, all prey to the same mortal dreads.
- Harlan Ellison

There is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of the happy time iIn misery.
- Henry Longfellow

Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
- Thomas Jefferson

A darkness carried in the heart can not be cured by moving the body from one place to another.
- from "Babylon 5: Dust to Dust"

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
- Graham Greene

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.
- Confucius

The one important thing I have learnt over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking oneself seriously. The first is imperative and the second disastrous.
- Harlan Ellison

Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.
- Goethe

Tho' we are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, -
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
- "Ulysses", Alfred Lord Tennyson