Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

With modern American dentistry it is simply amazing to see what transformation can be wrought in a single day.

The museums of medieval Europe, from Holland to Tuscany, are crammed with instruments and devices upon which the holy men labored devoutly, in order to see how long they could keep someone alive while being roasted. It is not needful to go into further details, but there were also religious books of instruction in this art, and guides for the detection of heresy by pain.

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.