Valentine's Day is one of those tricky celebrations where you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you love it, you're buying into a holiday created to sell greeting cards, bad bouquets, and shoddy love-themed stuffed animals. And if you're opposed to it, you're considered lonely and single and have clearly never had a valentine.

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

When you explain to people what you're trying to do, as opposed to just making demands or delegating tasks, you can build instant trust, even if it's just for that short time you're on the phone.

I always used to travel without a passport case, and because of it I think I'm four passports in. I bought this small Tumi case to protect my new one, and it works really well, not just for protecting it but also for keeping credit cards and small stuff. I just throw it in my bag when I'm traveling, as opposed to stuffed in my pocket.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company's lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.

I always received much more satisfaction as a defense attorney in obtaining an acquittal for a client than I ever have as a D.A. in obtaining a conviction. All my interests and sympathies tend to be on the side of the individual as opposed to the state.

It is the right of our people to organize to oppose any law and any part of the Constitution with which they are not in sympathy.

Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?

There was a time when I was knocking on doors and concerned with being recognized in dominant culture. I've found a space where the terrain is different, where I'm embraced by people like me, and where I'm building new ways of doing things, as opposed to trying to insert myself in a place that might not be welcoming.

Indeed, there is much in pure humanitarian culture, as opposed to rigid scientific training, which encourages absorption in the affairs of mankind, and more or less indifference to the unfathomed abysses of star-strown space that yawn interminably about this terrestrial grain of dust.

Most of our history in space has been communicated in terms of action - what people do, a chronological list of events which have transpired - as opposed to the human experience of having done those things.

I found that a whole series of people opposed me simply on the grounds that I was a woman. The clerics took to the mosque saying that Pakistan had thrown itself outside the Muslim world and the Muslim umar by voting for a woman, that a woman had usurped a man's place in the Islamic society.

The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

When I want to make someone laugh in real life (as opposed to when I'm on stage where I tell one-liners), I tend to do prop comedy. For example, if I'm at the supermarket with my husband, I might put 16 bags of marshmallows in our cart when he's not looking, or if I'm trying to make a kid smile, I'll put my glasses on crooked.

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.

And for some reason, when I'm sad, I do listen to Leonard Cohen, I do listen to Joni Mitchell. I do find myself going to the music that's actually reflecting my mood, as opposed to sticking on Motown, which might actually bring my mood up.

However, we might oppose it, abortion is a sad feature of modern life.

Today, we're still loaded down - and, to some extent, embarrassed - by ancient myths, but we respect them as part of the same impulse that has led to the modern, scientific kind of myth. But we now have the opportunity to discover, for the first time, the way the universe is in fact constructed as opposed to how we would wish it to be constructed.

True Americanism is opposed utterly to any political divisions resting on race and religion.

Religion is something we don't talk about, and it is used by uneducated people as a weapon to divide us as opposed to connect with each other.

I prefer face-to-face conversation as opposed to texting. You need to go out of your way to spend good time with one another; you need to have a date night. Whether you have kids or a career or whatever, for a relationship to thrive, it's about making time for each other.

If you're going to take a jab at someone, you should at least have a bit more of a personal relationship with them. I feel like you can be funny and clever, as opposed to just outright vile.