Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

~ Thomas A. Edison

Speculation is perfectly all right, but if you stay there you've only founded a superstition. If you test it, you've started a science. 

~ Hal Clement, science fiction author (30 May 1922-2003) 

To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear of having ideas.

~ Leo Burnett

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present. 

~ Edmond de Goncourt, writer, critic, and publisher (26 May 1822-1896) 

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do. 

~ Bob Dylan, singer-songwriter (b. 24 May 1941) 

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. 

~ Margaret Fuller, author (23 May 1810-1850) 

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true. 

~ Honore de Balzac, novelist (20 May 1799-1850) 

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

~ Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (18 May 1872-1970)

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. 

~ Alan Kay, computer scientist (b. 17 May 1940) 

I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be. 

~ Studs Terkel, author and broadcaster (16 May 1912-2008)

I do not torture animals, and I do not support the torture of animals, such as that which goes on at rodeos: cowardly men in big hats abusing simple beasts in a fruitless search for manhood. 

~ George Carlin, comedian, actor, and author (12 May 1937-2008) 

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

~ Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style. 

~ Fred Astaire, dancer, actor, singer, musician, and choreographer (10 May 1899-1987) 

Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves. 

~ James Matthew Barrie, author (9 May 1860-1937) 

Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action. 

~ Sigmund Freud, neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis (6 May 1856-1939) 

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it. 

~ Christopher Morley, journalist, novelist, essayist, and poet (5 May 1890-1957) 

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. 

~ William Kingdon Clifford, mathematician and philosopher (4 May 1845-1879) 

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him. 

~ Niccolo Machiavelli, political philosopher and author (3 May 1469-1527)

Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he's potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of his tribe or his God. 

~ Benjamin Spock, pediatrician and author (2 May 1903-1998) 

Science is built with facts as a house is with stones, but a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. 

~ Jules Henri Poincaré, mathematician, physicist, and philosopher (29 Apr 1854-1912)