“Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.” — Sydney Smith

“Now she is like everyone else.” — Charles de Gaulle, at the funeral of his daughter Anne, who had Down syndrome, February 1948

“Humiliation and indifference, these are conditions every one of us finds unbearable — this is why the Coyote when falling is more concerned with the audience’s opinion of him than he is with the inevitable result of too much gravity.” — Chuck Jones

“I maintain that there is no common language or medium of understanding between people of education and without it — between those who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to you from what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power.” — William Hazlitt

“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” — Neil Armstrong, 1969

“Better if he had said something natural like, ‘Jesus, here we are.'” — Edmund Hillary, 1974

“I have somewhere met with the epitaph of a charitable man, which has very much pleased me. I cannot recollect the words, but the sense of it is to this purpose; What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.” — Joseph Addison

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.” — Albert Einstein

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” — Oscar Wilde

“We think as we do mainly because other people think so.” — Samuel Butler

“In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.” — William Kingdon Clifford

(He distilled this into a credo: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”)

“Why does one never hear of a blessing thundering down the years and pursuing a certain family while pouring the gifts of the gods into their laps?” — Lady Norah Ida Emily Noel Bentinck, My Wanderings and Memories, 1924