“If you're reluctant to weep, you won't live a full and complete life.”

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

“The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.”

“Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.”

“No use going to class unless you go to the library.”

“The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.”

“Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.”

“Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of winds, by steam, by gas of balloon, by electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own element.”

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing.”

“They have a plentiful lack of wit.”

“Thou sodden-witted lord! thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows.”

“Things are often spoke and seldom meant.”

“All hoods make not monks.”

“Twas never merry world Since lowly feigning was called compliment.”

“How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”

“The cannon will not suffer any other sound to be heard for miles and for years around it.”

“A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.”

“Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.”

“The President proclaims war, and those Senators who dissent are not those who know better, but those who can afford to...Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.”

“We can sit here and talk about all the negativity, which we've done a little bit, but for every act of evil in the world, there are a million acts of kindness. Basically, our nature is to love each other and care about each other, and most of us do that. Most of us have no quarrel with anybody who's living on another side of the planet and who might have a different religious persuasion. It's just these small minorities to the far right and the far left who get all of the news time and print space.”

“I've got to tell you, the Internet is a place you go when you want to turn your brain on, and television is a place you go when you want to turn your brain off. I'm not at all convinced that the twain will meet.”

“Programs like 'Jeopardy' and 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' are ridiculous. They're the stupidest shows in history. They're making us dumber. They don't give us information, they give us facts, factoids. You don't learn who Napoleon was and how he was motivated. You learn what year he was born, and when he died. That's useless.”

“My father watched football with the sound off because he lived in fear of hearing the voice of Howard Cosell.”