The biggest (meaningful) number of all

"... astronomy is not the place to look. The big numbers of astronomy are additive. They arise because we are counting stars, planets, atoms and photons in a huge volume. If you want really huge numbers you need to find a place where the possibilities multiply rather than add. For this you need complexity. And for complexity you need biology.
10^70,000,000,000,000
This is the modern estimate of the number of different electrical patterns that the brain could hold. In some sense it is the number of different possible thoughts or ideas that a human brain could [think]."
-John D. Barrow

"It is [an] advantage of taxes on articles of consumption that they contain in their own nature a security against excess. They prescribe their own limit; which cannot be exceeded without defeating the end proposed, that is, an extension of the revenue... If [taxes] are too high, they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds. This forms a complete barrier against any material oppression of the citizens by taxes of this class, and is itself a natural limitation of the power of imposing them."
-Alexander Hamilton

"The New Deal and the genuine risk of outright socialization of industry in the 1930s kept the American economy in deep doldrums for a much longer time than would have been the case if Uncle Sam just said "laissez faire" and had conspicuously ignored all the Very Smart People who clamored for socialism. No investor, after all, wants to put his assets at stake in a country whose government might tax away or outright confiscate these assets."
-Donald J. Boudreaux

Corporations

"Governments may set goals, but corporations get the work done...Some people are vitriolic about corporations. They say that they have become massive, antidemocratic, global and out of control...[but] corporations are just about the only human organization capable of achieving the complex and difficult tasks that lie ahead...Government departments are generally noncompetitive and often drift into forms of nonproductive behavior..."
James Martin, "The Meaning of the 21st Century."

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
-Louis Brandeis

"I'd rather live till I die, rather than die before I live."
-unknown

"It's what you learn after you think you know it all that really counts."
-old axiom, unknown

"Science is the lens through which we can discover and view the wonder of God's creation."
-Aladdinzane

The Universe is God's Painting

"The universe has the same relation to God as a story or painting would to us. As authors, we transcend our masterpiece. While the universe reflects the nature of it creator, it is decidedly "other." The furthest the two - creator and creation -- might be entwined is into a duality like a body and soul. We might say the author was the soul of the work. In Augustine's metaphor from the 4th century, the universe is the body for God's soul."
-Kevin Kelly

Astronaut Heroes

"They were all a certain kind of wild man type then. They were test pilots who drove things through the clouds that might disintegrate at any minute. They seemed to all be a little odd, and all in the same way. The gamut of things they had to know and do and endure made you end up with a kind of person smart enough to accomplish what was necessary and dumb enough to try it. The mixture of intense boredom and wild-eyed excitement seemed to attract a kind of laconic, self-regulating type. They'd endure all the foolishness required of them for a chance to strap a rocket on their back."
-http://sippicancottage.blogspot.com

Synopsis of this Blog?

"A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything."
-Sei Shonagon

Sense of Wonder

"The sense of wonder is not merely a useless "luxury capacity" that serves no human purpose. Rather, it is a spiritual sense that discloses valid information about the cosmos. In fact, like a divining rod, it tells us where to look for the water. For atheists and other philistines, the world loses its metaphysical transparency [and wonder]; surface is reality and everything is self-evident. They elevate our crudest way of knowing the world to the highest wisdom, and their self-satisfaction ensures that no spiritual growth can occur. They are a closed system."
-Robert Godwin