"The dude abides." - The Big Lebowski

“Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days.”
― Stephen Fry

"Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy."
- Groucho Marx

"We live in a world where people will have a GPS and a crucifix on the same dashboard — and you want me to have hope for these fuckin' monkeys on swing-sets?"
- Doug Stanhope

"Every fight is a food fight when you’re a cannibal."
- Demetri Martin

“Calvin: Why are you crying mom?
Mom: I'm cutting up an onion.
Calvin: It must be hard to cook if you anthropomorphisize your vegetables.”
― Bill Watterson

"There's a metal train that a mile long and at the very back end a lightning bolt struck her. How long til it reaches and kills the driver, provided that he's a good conductor?"
- Bo Burnham

"When I finished high school I wanted to take all my graduation money and buy myself a motorcycle. Buy my mom said no. See, she had a brother who died in a horrible motorcycle accident when he was 18. And I could just have his motorcycle."
- Anthony Jeselnik

"I saw a human pyramid once. It was very unnecessary."
- Mitch Hedberg

"Quotes are for dumb people who can't think of something intelligent to say on their own."
- Bo Burnham

"Adulthood feels like walking around in the desert with a bag over your head, being bumped into by people who rob you as they bore you."
- Dylan Moran

"Scientists have just built the world's biggest supercollider, and they're doing experiments to see what makes up protons. I hope that if the experiment's successful, the whole of our reality will dissolve, and a big sign will come up that says: Level Two."
- Frankie Boyle

"When I was a kid my parents used to tell me, 'Emo, don't go near the cellar door!' One day when they were away, I went up to the cellar door. And I pushed it and walked through and saw strange, wonderful things, things I had never seen before, like... trees. Grass. Flowers. The sun... that was nice..."
- Emo Phillips

"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it."
- Ellen Degeneres

“The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

"If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you."
- Terry Pratchett

“A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin

"My therapist says I'm afraid of success. I guess I could understand that, because after all, fulfilling my potential would REALLY cut into my sitting-around time..."
- Maria Bamford

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

"I think that when you get dressed in the morning, sometimes you're really making a decision about your behavior for the day. Like if you put on flip-flops, you're saying 'Hope I don't get chased today. Be nice to people in sneakers.'"
- Demetri Martin

“Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions.”
― Stephen Hawking

“I need not remind you that this was David Lynch's version of Dune, in which all of the characters were sexy and deformed at the same time. There was a character called the 3rd Stage Guild Navigator, which was a kind of giant floating fetus creature, that lived in a giant tank, with his orange mist of psychedelic spice swirling around him allowing him to bend space and time. He could never leave the tank or interact with the outside world. He had become, in his isolation, so deformed and so sexy that he had to talk through a kind of old-timey radio to the outside world and could never touch them.”
― John Hodgman

"Take down all those naked pictures of Ernest Borgnine you've got hanging in your shed."
- Weird Al

“He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said he’d seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-wrapped. “Why’d you buy them if you weren't going to watch them?” she asked. He looked at the tall, thin cabinets that contained the movies and seemed to ponder the question. “My childhood was on sale,” he said at last, “so I bought it.”
― Robert J. Sawyer

Mondays quote of the day:
“I want to create a seventeen-syllable word that encompasses the human condition, and then use that word to form the world’s most perfect haiku.”
― Jarod Kintz

“120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.”
― Sam Harris

“M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly.”
- Neil Gaiman

"He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which."
- Douglas Adams

"Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to let you in."
- Robert Frost

“Inconceivable!"
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
― William Goldman

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
― Marthe Troly-Curtin

“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Indeed, what is startling about the notion of a victimless crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless, its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish it. It is in such cases that the true genius lurking behind many of our laws stands revealed. The idea of a victimless crime is nothing more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin.”
― Sam Harris

“Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Arthur: Be quiet!
Dennis: You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!”
― Graham Chapman

“A few months after our friendly chat about kids (and my condescending remarks about New York), Mrs. Palin told conservative filmmaker John Ziegler that Katie Couric and I had exploited and profited by her family. But I know better than to respond to attacks in the media. Although if I were to respond, I would probably just say, "Nice reality show.”
― Tina Fey

"By the power of Steven Wrights beard!"
- Craig Ferguson

“Pigmentation was a quick and convenient way of judging a person. One of us, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once proposed we instead judge people by the content of their character. He was shot.”
― Jon Stewart

“I may be just an empty flesh terminal reliant on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that everything that makes me a unique human being is still out there somewhere, safe in a theoretical storage space owned by giant, multinational corporations.”
― Stephen Colbert

"That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." - Christopher Hitchens

"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it."
- George Bernard Shaw

“Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What's the trick?”
― Stephen Fry

“I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each.”
― Stephen Fry

"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
- Bertrand Russell

“I’m not even tone deaf, that’s the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing.
I’M NOT EVEN TONE FUCKING DEAF. I’m tone DUMB.”
― Stephen Fry

“I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman

"We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works."
- Douglas Adams

"It's not enough to bash in heads: you've got to bash in minds."
- Joss Whedon

"At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

"All we ever see of stars are their old photographs."
- Alan Moore

"I love the smell of the universe in the morning."
- Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“Religion has actually convinced people, many of them adults, that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!
But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!”
― George Carlin

“We walk a fine line between commendable passion for that which we love--starships, superpowers, costumes, fantastic stories--and an almost frightening militancy about the Right Way to Enjoy Them.”
― Stephen H. Segal

"Religion: it's given people hope in a world torn apart...by religion."
- Jon Stewart

"When I saw you, I saw love. When I saw you naked, I saw lust. When I saw your clone, I saw the future." - Jarod Kintz

"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize until you try to make it precise." - Bertrand Russell

"If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I bet they'd live a lot differently." - Bill Waterson

“CALVIN:
This whole Santa Claus thing just doesn't make sense. Why all the secrecy? Why all the mystery?
If the guy exists why doesn't he ever show himself and prove it?
And if he doesn't exist what's the meaning of all this?
HOBBES:
I dunno. Isn't this a religious holiday?
CALVIN:
Yeah, but actually, I've got the same questions about God.”
― Bill Watterson

"Animal Man: Listen, just tell me 1 thing: am I REAL or what?
Author: Of COURSE you're real. We wouldn't be here talking if you weren't real. You existed long before I wrote about you, and, if you're lucky, you'll still be young when I'm old...or dead. You're more real than I am."
- Grant Morrison

“There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.”
― Stephen Fry

“If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.
They're right. It does.
However much you beg it to stop.
It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.
It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life...
All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.
Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.
Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.
And then the world turns...
And somebody falls off...
And oh God it's such a long way down.
Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller...
Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.
We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.
Trying to measure how far we have to fall.
No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives...
Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold.
"Time's a great healer."
"At least it was quick."
"The world keeps turning."
Oh Alec—
Alec's dead.”
― Alan Moore

"In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded." - Terry Pratchet

"Mom and Dad say I should make my life an example of the principles I believe in...but every time I do, they tell me to stop."
- Bill Watterson

"We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win." - Douglas Adams

"Before it was a bomb, the bomb was an idea. Superman, however, was a stronger, faster, better idea."
- Grant Morrison

"I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories." - Dave Barry

“Music is what mathematics does on a Saturday night.”
― Aaron Sorkin

“Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.”
― Eugene O'Neill

“The clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop”
― Ben Aaronovitch

“Sometimes, parody or pastiche shows a deeper love for the original source material than a hundred official sequels ever could. In forty years, has there really ever been a better Star Trek movie than Galaxy Quest--or a better Fantastic Four movie than The Incredibles?”
― Stephen H. Segal

“When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered: "There's just something about you that pisses me off.”
― Stephen King

“So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath. So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as "the soul." So I hit him. What would you do?”
― Warren Ellis

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
― Douglas Adams

“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”
― H.G. Wells

“When my face was slashed, my dad held me on his lap in the car to the hospital, applying direct pressure with the swift calm of a veteran and an ex-fireman. I looked up and asked him, "Am I going to die?" "Don't speak," he said. So, yeah, he's not the kind of guy who wants to watch people eat bugs on Survivor. It's so clear to me how those two things are related.”
― Tina Fey

“Calvin: Trick or Treat!
Adult: Where's your costume? What are you supposed to be?
Calvin: I'm yet another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Madison Avenue and Hollywood, poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you're old and weak!
...Boy, am I scary or what?”
― Bill Watterson

“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”
― Mark Twain

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”
― Terry Pratchett

“I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.”
― Cornel West

“In 2002, having spent more than three years in one residence for the first time in my life, I got called for jury duty. I show up on time, ready to serve. When we get to the voir dire, the lawyer says to me, “I see you’re an astrophysicist. What’s that?” I answer, “Astrophysics is the laws of physics, applied to the universe—the Big Bang, black holes, that sort of thing.” Then he asks, “What do you teach at Princeton?” and I say, “I teach a class on the evaluation of evidence and the relative unreliability of eyewitness testimony.” Five minutes later, I’m on the street.
A few years later, jury duty again. The judge states that the defendant is charged with possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine. It was found on his body, he was arrested, and he is now on trial. This time, after the Q&A is over, the judge asks us whether there are any questions we’d like to ask the court, and I say, “Yes, Your Honor. Why did you say he was in possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine? That equals 1.7 grams. The ‘thousand’ cancels with the ‘milli-’ and you get 1.7 grams, which is less than the weight of a dime.” Again I’m out on the street.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Have you ever noticed that things that don’t kill you make you weaker? And great minds don’t think alike. If they did, the patent office would only have about fifty inventions. I started getting suspicious when I cried over spilt milk and the cashier took it off my bill.” - Wally”
― Scott Adams

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I'm not anti-social. I'm just not social.”
― Woody Allen

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
― Mark Twain

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“If I take a lamp and shine it toward the wall, a bright spot will appear on the wall. The lamp is our search for truth... for understanding. Too often, we assume that the light on the wall is God, but the light is not the goal of the search, it is the result of the search. The more intense the search, the brighter the light on the wall. The brighter the light on the wall, the greater the sense of revelation upon seeing it. Similarly, someone who does not search - who does not bring a lantern - sees nothing. What we perceive as God is the by-product of our search for God. It may simply be an appreciation of the light... pure and unblemished... not understanding that it comes from us. Sometimes we stand in front of the light and assume that we are the center of the universe - God looks astonishingly like we do - or we turn to look at our shadow and assume that all is darkness. If we allow ourselves to get in the way, we defeat the purpose, which is to use the light of our search to illuminate the wall in all its beauty and in all its flaws; and in so doing, better understand the world around us.”
― J. Michael Straczynski

“Calvin: Today for show and tell, I've brought a tiny miracle of nature: a single snowflake! I think we might all learn a lesson from how this utterly unique and exquisite crystal turns into an ordinary, boring molecule of water just like every other one when you bring it into the classroom.
And now, while the analogy sinks in, I will be leaving you drips and going outside...”
― Bill Watterson

“Perhaps you are thinking: 'But a tank costs several million dollars, not including floor mats. I don't have that kind of money.'
Don't be silly. You're a consumer, right? You have credit cards, right?
Perhaps you are thinking: 'Yes, but how am I going to pay the credit-card company?'
Don't be silly. You have a tank, right?”
― Dave Barry

“It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.”
― Stephen Fry

“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.”
― Alan Moore

“The spaceships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”
― Douglas Adams

“I consider conversations with people to be mind exercises, but I don't want to pull a muscle, so I stretch a lot. That's why I'm constantly either rolling my eyes or yawning.”
― Jarod Kintz

“It’s been a tough couple of years for condescending nerds. And if bookstores fall, Jon, America will be inundated with a wandering, snarky underclass of unemployable purveyors of useless and arcane esoterica.”
― John Hodgman

“The Universe is very, very big.
It also loves a paradox. For example, it has some extremely strict rules.
Rule number one: Nothing lasts forever.
Not you or your family or your house or your planet or the sun. It is an absolute rule. Therefore when someone says that their love will never die, it means that their love is not real, for everything that is real dies.
Rule number two: Everything lasts forever.”
― Craig Ferguson

“There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”
― Bill Watterson

…It's as if they actually think that what other people think of them somehow doesn't matter. I mean, I know we're all supposed to believe that, but obviously, none of us actually do. And nor should we, because it does! It does matter! And the people who genuinely believe it doesn't tend to be the very people who ought to care most what other people think of them, because what the other people are thinking is, 'No, actually, I don't think the Chinese are "up to something,"' or, 'You should use mouthwash,' or, 'Your mania for the collective socialization of agriculture will surely cause the deaths of millions,' or, 'Forty cats is too many cats.”
― David Mitchell

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life." - Terry Pratchett

"Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.” - John Waters