“I long to set foot where no man has trod before.”

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.

Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.

I am not the least afraid to die.

From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed. To group all facts under some general laws.

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult, at least I have found it so – than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.

Only the fittest will survive.

The loss of tastes for poetry and music is a loss of happiness.

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!

It is impossible to concieve of this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity.

I started tapping and I was okay. Then after about two years my feet knew what they were doing!

If you realized how beautiful you are, you would fall at your own feet.

I think ‘Tap Dogs’ has lasted so long because people have a natural interest in tap dancing.

Let’s just say that back in the old days, sex was available every two feet. But I never made love to anybody that did not want me to.

When I’m in power, here’s how I’m gonna put the country back on its feet. I’m going to put sterilizing agents in the following products: Sunny Delight, Mountain Dew, and Thick-Crust Pizza. Only the ‘tardiest of the ‘tards like the thick crust.

an optimist is the man who looks after your eyes, and the pessimist the person who looks after your feet.

My new shorty got a gymnastic back, ’87 emerald green on a classic Jag. She had the cleft palate, I ordered chef’s salad; She had the club foot, with that little arm, I couldn’t help but laugh…she ordered Chicken Parm.

TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006, maintainer of a foot long beard