Quotes on One Line

Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.

Eisenhower admitted that the budget can't be balanced and McCarthy said the communists are taking over. You don't know what to worry about these days - whether the country will be overthrown or overdrawn.

If horses had controlled investment decisions, there would have been no auto industry.

I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.

The idea of being a character who is kind of isolated, I can relate to that.

Stand-up is the place where you can do things that you could never do in public.

There are certain things that cannot be adequately explained to a virgin either by words or pictures.

My folks were English. They were too poor to be British. I still have a bit of British in me. In fact, my blood type is solid marmalade.

Though you have changed a thousand times, He has not changed once.

Here is the prime condition of success: Concentrate your energy, thought and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged. Having begun on one line, resolve to fight it out on that line, to lead in it, adopt every improvement, have the best machinery, and know the most about it.

With one linear centimeter of your lower colon there lives and works more bacteria (about 100 billion) that all humans who have ever been born. Yet many people continue to assert that it is we who are in charge of the world

The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it.

I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line.

...where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge.