If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this: that a man should back his own opinion against the world s. – Samuel Butler
All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others. – Samuel Butler
If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason. – Samuel Butler
When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence. – Samuel Butler
It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits. – Lewis Thomas