“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” — Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, 1980

“A footnote is like running downstairs to answer the doorbell during the first night of marriage.” — John Barrymore

“If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay — in solid cash — the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.” — Aldous Huxley

Epigrams of poet Ralph Hodgson:

• Oaths in anguish rank with prayers.
• The wink was not our best invention.
• When crises pall, humdrum is sensational.
• But Woman — in whose image made?
• A sparrow in a snowstorm with a feather in his bill: that is Faith.
• Forget the slush, but keep the snow / Of Christmasses of long ago.
• Anniversary: Familiarity breeds content.
• Some things have to be believed to be seen.
• Who shall paraphrase a tear!
• There’s one thing to be said for sin — it does give conscience exercise.
• Why not Foremothers?
• The Golden Rule was called new-fangled, once upon a time.
• Blessed are the children of a nobody.
• The handwriting on the wall may be a forgery.

And “The ‘last word’ is only the latest.”