Everything is valuable under the right conditions. To a man dying of thirst, water be more precious than gold. To a drowning man, water be of little worth and great trouble.

That's what friends are for-to be strong for you when you need a moment to find your own strength.

After that, I came back every year. Everyone said, 'Well, when you retire you can move there.' But I said, 'Why should I live my whole life where I don't want to be.'

There would be nothing I could do to you that would harm you more than what you're already doing to harm yourself...You are never going to amount to anything. You will always be the worthless muck people scrape from their shoes. You only get one life and you are wasting yours. That's a terrible shame. I doubt you will ever know what it is to be truly happy, to achieve anything of worth, to have genuine pride in yourself. You bring it all on yourself, and I could do no worse to you.

The only sovereign I can allow to rule me is reason. The first law of reason is this: what exists exists; what is is. From this irreducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. This is the foundation from which life is embraced. Reason is a choice. Wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discovering them. Reason is our only way of grasping reality–it is our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort of thinking, to reject reason, but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to see." -Richard

Knowledge is a weapon. I intend to be formidably armed.

No amount of telling is worth doing it once.