Al forms of consensus about great books and perennial problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of what is already known. Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.

We are people with all the hopes, dreams, passions, and faults of everyone else. Eighty percent of us are born into families with no history of dwarfism.

Billy Barty

The effort to remold, in one's own life, the culture one has grown into is heavy with danger. The searcher is likely to be treated as a criminal or a madman, condemned and criticized by his own society, ridiculed, even persecuted. Even if he is more fortunate--even if he is simply ignored by others--he must begin his struggle as a cripple. For to consciously reject the generalized attitudes' of the parent society is to reject positive reference points that have helped him evaluate his actions and accomplishments.This is the price of freedom on the peripheries. We are able to free ourselves from our parent culture only by destroying parts of ourselves, much as an animal might escape the hunter's trap by gnawing off its own leg. But unlike the wounded animal, the detached person is doubly crippled; however he mutilates himself, he will never quite be free of the trap but will carry it with him in his new freedom.

Donald A. Hansen, An Invitation

You may never get to that perfect world that you're waiting for where everything's going to be perfect and you got that much money and your house paid off.

Joel Osteen

And the funny thing is, I've always been an optimist - it's practically a congenital disorder with me.

Molly Ivins

The life of an uneducated man is as useless as the tail of a dog which neither covers its rear end, nor protects it from the bites of insects.

Chanakya

Truth often sacrificed for the sake of stability and peace.

Toba Beta

Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.

Ralph Ellison in Juneteenth

Perfect does not mean perfect actions in a perfect world, but appropriate actions in an imperfect one.

R.H. Blyth

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.

Vernon Grounds

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

Walter Pater

Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognizes liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life.

B. R. Ambedkar

Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.

George S. Patton