A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.

“Hell is other people.”

—Jean-Paul Sartre

“Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why use them?”

—Dong Zhongshu

“The mythology of Einstein shows him as a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as of a function analogous to the mechanical making of sausages.”

—Roland Barthes

“Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.”

—Samuel Johnson

“Man has great power of speech, but the greater part thereof is empty and deceitful. The animals have little, but that little is useful and true; and better is a small and certain thing than a great falsehood.”

—Leonardo da Vinci

See the connections? Write your guesses in the comments — and feel free to leave your own "uncomebackable" quotes — and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.

Images: faniq.com, NYTimes, sfgate.com, NYTimes, pnas.org

Answers to last week's installment:

• "The Many Garbs of Gaga" (InTouch)
• "Letter to a Young Critic: William Giraldi Defends True Criticism" (The Daily Beast)
• “'I’m Dreaming of a White President': Randy Newman on His New Song" (Slate)
• Brooklyn Book Festival Official Site (Facebook)
• "Riff Raff’s Got a Record Deal: Making Sense of the Most Viral Human Being in Music" (Gawker)