“The more I deepen the topic of regions (I'm in Milan for this reason), the more I am dismayed by having to write about it. It doesn't take much to understand that what these Lombard regionalists are pursuing, knowingly or unknowingly, is a Cisalpine secessionist plan. And, once they've had the instrument, they'll manage to realize it. There's a reason why Bassetti already no longer speaks of a "Lombardy region", but of a "Padania region", of which the rest of Italy would be but an appendix. If they'll succeed (and they will succeed), farewell Risorgimento! It wasn't but a fiction, agreed, and in practice it has failed. But with what will we replace it?”

Shut Up, You Fucking Baby

As quoted in "China rebukes Israel ahead of Netanyahu visit" http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/07/world/asia/china-israel-talks/index.html?hpt=hp_t2 in cnn.com (7 May 2013).
2010s

22 February 1756
1750s, Diaries (1750s-1790s)

Sādhanā : The Realisation of Life http://www.spiritualbee.com/spiritual-book-by-tagore/ (1916)
Context: Though the West has accepted as its teacher him who boldly proclaimed his oneness with his Father, and who exhorted his followers to be perfect as God, it has never been reconciled to this idea of our unity with the infinite being. It condemns, as a piece of blasphemy, any implication of man's becoming God. This is certainly not the idea that Christ preached, nor perhaps the idea of the Christian mystics, but this seems to be the idea that has become popular in the Christian west.
But the highest wisdom in the East holds that it is not the function of our soul to gain God, to utilise him for any special material purpose. All that we can ever aspire to is to become more and more one with God. In the region of nature, which is the region of diversity, we grow by acquisition; in the spiritual world, which is the region of unity, we grow by losing ourselves, by uniting. Gaining a thing, as we have said, is by its nature partial, it is limited only to a particular want; but being is complete, it belongs to our wholeness, it springs not from any necessity but from our affinity with the infinite, which is the principle of perfection that we have in our soul.

Speculating on the nature of radioactive emanations, in his Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1904/ramsay-lecture.html, December 12, 1904.

1990s

"Kanan Makiya speaks about Iraq 5 years later...", Washington Post (March 20, 2008)

Interviewed with Wired: Gary Wolf. Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html (February 1996)
1990s
Context: Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people... Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

The American Mercury (May 1926)
1920s
Context: It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it—to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse. It is, of course, quite true that there is a region in which science and religion do not conflict. That is the region of the unknowable.