“Essentially, we have always been cave-dwellers.”
“I am breathing calmly, breathing like the sea.”
— Pentii Holappa, Seagulls in Autumn
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
— Marcus Aurelius
“We all wear masks, metaphorically speaking.”
— Jim Carrey as Stanley Ipkiss in “The Mask“
“The special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.”
— G. K. Chesterton
“What you seek is seeking you.”
— Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
“Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.”
— Franz Kafka
“The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.”
— Thomas Jefferson
“The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. […]
“For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.”
— Gospel of Luke 12:48 (KJV)
“The basic concept underlying the Eighth Amendment is nothing less than the dignity of man. While the State has the power to punish, the Amendment stands to assure that this power be exercised within the limits of civilized standards. … The Court [has] recognized … that the words of the Amendment are not precise, and that […]
“A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849)
There are men who struggle for a day and they are good.
There are men who struggle for a year and they are better.
There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still.
But there are those who struggle all their lives:
These are the indispensable ones.
— Bertolt Brecht, In Praise of the Fighters […]
“I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville (1840)