Harvard, Princeton, and Yale were originally founded as seminaries. They are seminaries once again. The doctrine they embrace is both insecure and oppressive in its prohibition of insiders and outsiders from pursuing free inquiry. Rather than wrestle with hard questions about human dignity, individual agency, and speech, many in the Ivy League seem poised to double down on fanaticism.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
~ John Steinbeck
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there is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
~ James Baldwin
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Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
~ Diane Arbus
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Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.
~ Mark Twain
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Nothing can come out of nothing, any more than a thing can go back to nothing.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
~ Iris Murdoch
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It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.
~ Sun Tzu
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Suppose no one asked a question, what would be the answer?
~ Gertrude Stein
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