“Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.”

If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.

Human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

If the future is to remain open and free, we need people who can tolerate the unknown, who will not need the support of completely worked out systems or traditional blueprints from the past.

Humanity lies in man’s capacity to question the known and imagine the unknown.

There is no evidence that suggests women are naturally better at caring for children… with the fact of child-bearing out of the centre of attention, there is even more reason for treating girls first as human beings, then as women.

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.

It was not until we saw the picture of the earth, from the moon, that we realized how small and how helpless this planet is – something that we must hold in our arms and care for.

If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water.

WE MUST DEVISE A SYSTEM IN WHICH PEACE IS MORE REWARDING THAN WAR.

I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.

Children not only have to learn what their parents learned in school, but also have to learn how to learn. This has to be recognized as a new problem which is only partly solved.

Earth Day is the first holy day…and is devoted to the harmony of nature… The celebration offends no historical calendar, yet it transcends them all.

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

For the human species to evolve, the conversation must deepen.

There is no more creative force in the world than the menopausal woman with zest.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.

Still being ambitious to want to play on the record, I was a mediocre keyboard player. And uh, I seized the opportunity and played the organ.

If you have a great band with a mediocre drummer, you have a mediocre band. If you have a mediocre band with a great drummer, you have a great band!

With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.

That said, there’s a lot of bad telly, but there’s also a lot of very high quality that is something I’d be much more proud of than a mediocre film.

Philadelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.

I’m just gonna tell her, “Be a staff writer for a sitcom. Because they’ll have to hire you, they can’t really fire you, and you don’t have to produce that much. It’ll be awesome.”