"You're a gentleman," they used to say to him. "You shouldn't have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that's no occupation for a gentleman."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
"Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also."
"Pass by us, and forgive us our happiness."
- Dostoevsky, The Idiot
". . . The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. . . ."
- Alfred Kinsey
"No documents, no person."
- Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."
- Albert Einstein
"Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke
"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia."
- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being