Another ragbag selection of quotes which amused or interested me over the last week or so …

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
[Clive James]

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
[Philip K Dick]

The entrée wasn’t tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn’t have been primordial soup because morphogenesis was already taking place.
[Clive James]

No, you can’t deny women their basic rights and pretend it’s about your ‘religious freedom’. If you don’t like birth control, don’t use it. Religious freedom doesn’t mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.
[Barak Obama]

[S]ome insect penises come equipped with hooks that enable the ensconced male to grab a previous suitor’s sperm packet and remove it from the female. I suggest that these hooks be called cuckholders.
[Steve Mirsky; Scientific American, July 2012]

No man in this country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or to his property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel into his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow – and quite rightly – to take every advantage which is open to it under the taxing statutes for the purpose of depleting the taxpayer’s pocket. And the taxpayer is, in like manner, entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the depletion of his means by the Revenue.
[Lord Clyde in Ayrshire Pullman Motor Services & Ritchie v Commissioners of the Inland Revenue (1929) 14 TC 754]

For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
[Winston Churchill]

Sunday went as Sunday’s should, soporifically and full bellied into the evening.
[Katy Wheatley, http://katyboo1.wordpress.com]

You see, stand here long enough and all life will pass before you.