The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.

The jester is brother to the sage.

One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.

The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

In any language it is a struggle to make a sentence say exactly what you mean.

I believe that the evidence for telepathy is overwhelming and that it is a part of reality that is above science. Science allows us to glimpse [only] fragments of reality.

If this book has made any point clear, I hope it's that things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.

The Magician makes the visible, invisible.The Scientist makes the invisible, visible.The Artist stands in between, indivisible.

I don't normally do big movies. I'm new to this world. And I've always been afraid that jumping onto a big budget film, you would lose the relationships in favour of special effects.

I'm not going to join any party. If I do vote again, and if I do become, you know, politically active, it will be independent.

Familiarity is a suspension of almost all the laws of civility, which libertinism has introduced into society under the notion of ease.

You cut a hole in the building and people can look inside and see the way other people really lived.. it's making space without building it

One cannot be prepared for something while secretly believing it will not happen.

And I hope very much that the ALP will become increasingly engaged in the international discussions that are taking place amongst centre-left parties generally.

To succeed in life, you must have the courage to be hated.

The name Sissy came because my brothers called me that.