If we had had more time for discussion we should probably 
have made a great many more mistakes.
--Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), Russian revolutionary. My Life, ch. 36 (1930), 
  of the discussions in the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party 
  about the proposed development of the Red Army.
  
How wonderful that we have met with paradox.
Now we have some hope of making progress.
--Niels Bohr

Anarchism:
Lady Dynamite, let's dance quickly,
Let's dance and sing and dynamite everything! 
--French Anarchist Song of the 1880s.
  
Accidents, try to change them-it's impossible. The accidental reveals man. 
--Pablo Picasso
  
I don't believe in accidents. 
There are only encounters in history. 
There are no accidents.
--Elie Wiesel (b. 1928), Rumanian-born U.S. writer. 
  
A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, 
drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status- 
all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremenduous sexual 
event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a 
thing).
--J. G. Ballard (b. 1930), British author. 
  
Every man over forty is a scoundrel. 
--George Bernard Shaw 
  
The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; 
if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little. 
--Mark Twain 
  
Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas. 
--Laurence Sterne (1713-68), English author. 
  
How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, 
and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person? 
--François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-80), French writer, moralist. 
  
Life is too short for a long story.
--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762),
  
I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the 
observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the 
person who took the lead in the business.
--Edmund Burke (1729-97), Irish philosopher, statesman. 
  
For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, 
nights left open to chance.
--Mignon McLaughlin (b. 1915?), U.S. author, editor.