The knowledge and understanding of the world which science gives us and the magnificent opportunity which it extends to us to control and use the world for the extension of our pleasure in it has never been greater than it now is. – Polykarp Kusch
All around me insisted that my doubts proved only my own ignorance and sinfulness that they knew by experience they would soon give place to true knowledge, and an advance in religion and I felt something like indecision. – Maria Monk
My definition [of a philosopher] is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down. – Louisa May Alcott, in Life, Letters, and Journals, ed. E.D. Cheney, 1889