The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity — a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.

True literacy is becoming an arcane art, and the nation is steadily "dumbing down."

All the hundreds of millions of people who, in their time, believed the Earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it by an inch.

But life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far and superior to that of muscle and sinew. Let me tell you, if you don't know it from your own experience, that reading a good book, losing yourself in the interest of words and thoughts, is for some people (me, for instance) an incredible intensity of happiness.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Many a prophecy, by the mere force of its being believed, is transmuted to fact.

Tens of millions of Americans who neither know or understand the actual arguments for, or even against, evolution, march in the Army of the Night with their Bibles held high