‘Tis very certain that each person carries in their eye the exact indication of their rank in the immense scale of humanity, and we are always learning to read it. A complete person should need no auxiliaries to their personal presence.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
:::
It is only by a great effort that we rouse ourselves to act, to fight, to struggle, to be heard above the wind, to crush flowers as we walk.
~ Janet Malcolm
:::
Punishing people for their words does not make the words vanish from memory. The unsayable is not unthinkable. Indeed, the punishment of the word may actually magnify the impact of the thought. Never mind abstract free-speech principles: Purely on pragmatic grounds, when a member of a community says something that bitterly divides the community, the way to a resolution is not to suppress the thought, but to argue it out.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
:::
True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out — you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
~ Henry James
:::
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
:::
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
:::
Panic at the thought of doing a thing is a challenge to do it.
― Henry S. Haskins
:::
The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
:::
The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.
~ Jonathan Haidt
:::
There is fear and intolerance in pride; it is sensitive and uncompromising. The less promise and potency in the self, the more imperative is the need for pride. The core of pride is self-rejection.
~ Eric Hoffer
:::