"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness."

Mark Twain.

Twain/Sam Clemens has been a favourite author since I was a boy. In the bus to work a few days ago I looked up from my book when it was picking up passengers and saw someone had written this quote on the window of their flat facing out into the street two stories up where only the occasional person in a double decker bus would be high and close enough to read it. How lovely. Of course, I tend to include reading as 'travel' because it is travel for the mind...

"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically"

This was on an attempted spam comment to be moderated on the FPI blog this morning. A bit more creative than the usual nonsense and attempts; I thought it seemed familiar, so after a spot of Googling it turns out to be a quote from Albert Einstein. Looking around the web for some more Einstein quotes I found one which was more to my taste:

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty"