God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed. That is the meaning of evolution.

You can't blame the innocent; they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them.

What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and revelation in those first fourteen years?

I slipped a bullet into a chamber and, holding the revolver behind my back, spun the chambers [cylinders] round... I put the muzzle... into my right ear and pulled the trigger. There was a minute click, and looking down at the chamber I could see that the charge [the bullet] had moved into the firing position.

In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

As long as nothing happens anything is possible.

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it

Some lies are just kindness.

They sounded like truth but he rejected them. Comfort can come too easily: he thought, those hands will never hold my fall.

However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance -- so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.