"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

-Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill ( Potentially misattributed to Churchill )

"People who brag about their IQ are losers."

-Stephen Hawking

"Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself."

-George Bernard Shaw ( From Don Juan in Hell: From Man and Superman )

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

-Isaac Newton ( From his memoirs )

"Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone."

-C.S. Lewis ( From the book 'Mere Christianity' )

"Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think."

-Benjamin Disraeli

"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."

-G.K. Chesterton

"You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending."

-C.S. Lewis

"Since it is so likely that children will met cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of Brave Knights & Heroic Courage."

-C.S. Lewis

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."

-Aldous Huxley ( Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays )

"When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything."

-G.K. Chesterton

"The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions."

-The Lord Tennyson

"More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of."

-The Lord Tennyson ( Idylls of the King' (1842-85) 'The Passing of Arthur' )

"for the deed's sake have I done the deed, In uttermost obedience to the King."

-The Lord Tennyson ( from Idylls of the King )

"Sanity is not statistical."

-George Orwell ( From the novel '1984' )

"We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day."

-Edith Lovejoy Pierce

"The main point of Christianity is that it is a religion for sinners. Jesus made that very clear. When the Pharisees asked his disciples, "Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?" he said, "I come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance." Only a small fraction of sinners repent and do good things but only a small fraction of good people are led by their religion to do bad things."

-Freeman Dyson

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach."

-Charles Dickens ( Ebenezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol )

"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing."

-John Stuart Mill

"Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change."

-Stephen William Hawking

"To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you."

-C.S. Lewis

"Be slow to judge for we know little of what has been done and nothing of what has been resisted."

-Rudyard Kipling

"To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure."

-J.K. Rowling ( Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling )

"Beware of overconcern for money, or position, or glory. Someday you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are."

-Rudyard Kipling

"He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."

-John Stuart Mill ( On Liberty by John Stuart Mill )

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read a book of quotes."

-Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill