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.

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 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.

Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.

What's big, thick, makes the earth move, and wants to have its way with you?" "I don't know, but can you introduce me?

Never explain―your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

I've grown tired of smoke and mirrors. I yearn for the clean, well-lighted place.

If America is to succeed in responding to these 21st Century challenges, our political system cannot continue to bog down in the mire of partisan gamesmanship.

If we're isolated, we come to feel powerless when we're not.

Let's say that you commit a crime, you get caught, you might get sent to prison. It's going to be bad. But if you get caught spying, you're literally hanged the next morning.

An attribute of Rosa Hubermann, she was a good woman for a crisis.

The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.

I am an eyewitness to the ways in which people relate to themselves and to each other, and my work is a way of scooping and ladling that experience.

The fine-art world knows very little about the cartoon world.