Accidents, try to change them-it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.
--Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish artist. Quoted in: Vogue (New York, 
1 Nov. 1956).

I don't believe in accidents. 
There are only encounters in history. 
There are no accidents.
--Elie Wiesel (b. 1928), Rumanian-born U.S. writer. Quoted in: 
International Herald Tribune (Paris, 15 Sept. 1992).

A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, 
drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status-
all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremenduous sexual 
event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a 
thing).
--J. G. Ballard (b. 1930), British author. Interview in Penthouse (London, 
1970; repr. in Re/Search, no. 8/9, San Francisco, 1984).

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
--George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. Man 
and Superman, "Maxims for Revolutionists: Stray Sayings" (1903)

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; 
if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.
--Mark Twain (1835-1910), U.S. author. Notebook, ch. 33 (ed. by Albert 
Bigelow Paine, 1935), entry for Dec. 1902.

Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas.
--Laurence Sterne (1713-68), English author. Tristram Shandy, Dedication 
to bk. 9 (1760-67).

Anarchism:
Lady Dynamite, let's dance quickly,
Let's dance and sing and dynamite everything!
--French Anarchist Song of the 1880s.

How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, 
and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?
--François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-80), French writer, moralist. 
Sentences et Maximes Morales, no. 313 (1678).

Life is too short for a long story.
--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762),

I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the 
observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the 
person who took the lead in the business.
--Edmund Burke (1729-97), Irish philosopher, statesman. Reflections on the 
Revolution in France (1790)

For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to 
chance.
--Mignon McLaughlin (b. 1915?), U.S. author, editor. Atlantic (Boston, 
July 1965).

If we had had more time for discussion we should probably
have made a great many more mistakes.
--Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), Russian revolutionary. My Life, ch. 36 (1930), 
of the discussions in the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party 
about the proposed development of the Red Army.