It's fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.

I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.

Dave Eggers

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death.

John Ralston Saul

Every man hath a general desire of his own happiness and likewise a variety of particular affections, passions, and appetites to particular external objects.

Joseph Butler

Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.

Huston Smith

It is quite annoying that we have to change the sound we invented just to avoid sounding like people who simply copy us, but... it is flattering and of course challenging.

Jonathan Davis

You must go after your wish. As soon as you start to pursue a dream, your life wakes up and everything has meaning.

Barbara Sher

Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country?

Kahlil Gibran, The New Frontier

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intellegent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as his only AVAILABLE one, thus proving that he is himself AVAILABLE for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.

Henry David Thoreau

There does not seem to be that collegiality I referred to, there seems to be much more of a them versus us attitude, rather than we all have a role to play in this process so let's get on with it.

Len G. Murray

I was ordained, said the preacher. No one ordains artists. They ordain themselves. Just as Taleswapper had expected. The preacher retreated to authority as soon as he feared his ideas could not stand on their own merit. Reasonable argument was impossible when authority became the arbiter.

Orson Scott Card

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

Carl Jung