Lootsma.dk / Lootsma.no - last update May 2017 "The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived." - Søren Kirkegaard - "If nobody tells you it is impossible, then you are not ambitious enough" - Bertrand Piccard - "It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is." - Desidenus Erasmus - "I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road." -Stephen Hawking - "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." & "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." - Winston Churchill - "In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." - Abraham Lincoln - "Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education." - Franklin D. Roosevelt - "What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." - Carl Sagan - "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen Roberts - "Frightened of change? But what can exist without it? What’s closer to nature’s heart? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed?” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations - “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson - ....