Shakespeare, Hamlet

• Mark Twain: What Is Man?

• John Steinbeck

• Bertrand Russell

• Paul Johnson

• Mary Easty, accused of witchcraft

• Walter M. Miller, A Canticle For Leibowitz: "Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again... to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?... Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?"

• Denis Diderot: "There is only one step from fanaticism to barbarism."

• Oscar Wilde: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

• Robert Burns: "Man's inhumanity to man."

• Plutarch, Cicero: "No beast is more savage than man, when possessed with power answerable to his rage."

• Robert Oppenheimer, Supervising Physicist, Manhattan Project:  "...now I am become Death [Shiva], the destroyer of worlds..." -- 16 July, 1945 at 0529 HRS, in the Jornada del Muerto Desert near the Trinity site in the White Sands Missile Range, quoting from the Bhagavad-Gita upon witnessing first atomic detonation by mankind.

• William Laurence, New York Times, September 26, 1945: "The Atomic Age began at exactly 5:30 Mountain War Time on the morning of July 15, 1945, on a stretch of semi-desert land about 5 airline miles from Alamogordo, New Mexico... And just at that instance there rose from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one."

• William Shakespeare, Othello: "O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!"

• Seneca, Epistolae Morales: "Drunkeness is simply voluntary insanity.

• Bernard Baruch, The Public Years: "Even when we discover basic truths about human affairs, it is another thing to overcome human failings -- the greed, hatred, sloth or whatever it is that keeps us from acting on those truths. In a laboratory, men follow truth wherever it may lead ... [but] in human relations, men have a supreme talent for ignoring truth ... they do not like."

• St. Paul, Galatians 5:19 - 21, The Message translation: "It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on..."

• Abraham Lincoln: "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

• Mother Theresa: "It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish."

• Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol: “And the wild regrets and the bloody sweats, None knew so well as I: For he who lives more lives than one, More deaths than one must die.”

• John Adams: "There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

• John Steinbeck: "I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?"

• Hermann Hesse (1877-1962): "If you hate a person, you hate something in them that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us."

• Abraham Lincoln: "We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us."

• Joseph Heller, Catch-22: "Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them."

• Robert Mitchum: Commenting on the disparity between his advanced age and that of the middle-aged character he was to portray in Winds of War: "It's getting harder and harder to play 39."

• St. Augustine, The Confessions: "But I wretched, most wretched, in the very commencement of my early youth, had begged chastity of Thee, and said, 'Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.' For I feared lest Thou shouldest hear me soon, and soon cure me of the disease of concupiscence, which I wished to have satisfied rather than extinguished."

• Hannah Arendt, American political philosopher, 1970: "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."

• Bertrand Russell: "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

• Mark Twain: "Man is a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired."

• Abigail Adams, 1775: "I am more and more convinced that Man is a dangerous creature, and that power whether vested in many or a few is ever grasping, and like the grave cries give, give. The great fish swallow up the small, and he who is most strenuous for the Rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of Government. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which Humane Nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances."

• George Steiner: "We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach or Schubert and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning."

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

                           Oscar Wilde