"Every time you put milk into your coffee and watch it mix and realize that you can't unmix that milk from your coffee, you are learning something profound about the Big Bang, about conditions in the very, very early universe. This is just a giant clue that the real universe has given to us to how the fundamental laws of physics work.

"We know that the existing theories aren't right and we need to move beyond them. Quantum mechanics and general relativity are incompatible, but nature is not incompatible with itself. Nature figures out some way to reconcile these ideas.

"We don't know the answer to the who done it, who is the guilty party, why the universe is like that."

-Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist

Cold War

"Never in human history has there been a sustained conflict over four decades between two great power blocs in which no great war took place and one of the two won a decisive victory resulting in the dismantlement of the rival alliance and even the dismantlement of the country that led it."
-Scott W. Johnson, www.powerlineblog.com

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve.
"It doesn't matter whether you're a lion or a gazelle--when the sun comes up, you'd better be running."
-Roger Bannister, first person to run a mile in under four minutes