The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being.

By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.

The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation.

Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.

The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.

In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.

It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back.

The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.

The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.

The Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Birds, the Animals, the Flowers, are all proof that a Universal Power exists.

Parts win prizes, not actors.

It is probably not a good idea to ask someone to expound a position they do not accept and do not feel they even fully understand.

I'm very interested in people, in general.

We need more bodies, 'cause it's not looking enough like the last scene in Hamlet already. --Chopper Jim Chopin

If I have to be remembered for something, I want it remembered that I really liked children and was a good camp counselor.

For a group of people who claimed to be concerned for her safety, they did seem to have developed rather a habit of encouraging uprisings against monarchs.

I've never felt like I had anything important to say.

Shania Twain ... has done more for country and western than heartbreak and whiskey combined.

I was in a Printing-house in Hell, and saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.