Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.

Whenever a total eclipse of the sun was visible in an accessible region parties were sent out to observe it.

In 1860 a total eclipse of the sun was visible in British America.

My father was the most rational and the most dispassionate of men.

The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington.

As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest.

We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.

Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird.

What we now call school training, the pursuit of fixed studies at stated hours under the constant guidance of a teacher, I could scarcely be said to have enjoyed.

So far as the economic condition of society and the general mode of living and thinking were concerned, I might claim to have lived in the time of the American Revolution.

If my impressions are correct, our educational planing mill cuts down all the knots of genius, and reduces the best of the men who go through it to much the same standard.

Save your work, you may never know when the light will go off.

Snow is the beginning and the end of everything.

I think we need to always mimic reality in our fiction. I think that we can stir things up and reveal a truth beneath the surface in that way as well.

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

The biggest thing is to make sure that when something comes out about you that is false that you prove it's not true.

Maybe he murdered Myrtle; that would’ve done everyone a favor. . . .

As they do every year, al-Qaida has threatened to disrupt and ruin Christmas. You know, we already have a group that disrupts and ruins Christmas every year. They're called relatives.

All is ephemeral - fame and the famous as well.

Leisure and the cultivation of human capacities are inextricably interdependent.

I sort of feel like music saved my life when I was young. This is the one thing that I knew I was good at.