Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.

All the big words -virtue, justice, truth, ...- are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness

Everything had been based on a kind of certainty, a sense of man at the center of things, a sense of order and hierarchy. And suddenly, almost simultaneously, extraordinary discoveries are made.

I am magnificently prepared for the long littleness of life. There is diddley-squat for me to look forward to. Zilch, zero, zip-all, sweet lipperty-pipperty nothing. The only thought that will give me the energy to carry on is that someone has a life which would be diminished by my departure from it.

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

People still don't get how astounding Darwinism is. People think what shocked everybody was that Charles Darwin seemed to be saying we had descended from apes.

There is no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.