Quotations

Because a quotation for everything saves original thinking for cognitive misers, here are some.

“I wish that I may never think the smiles of the great and powerful a sufficient inducement to turn aside from the straight path of honesty and the convictions of my own mind.”
David Ricardo

“I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.”
Abigail Adams

“The need to choose, to sacrifice some ultimate values to others, turns out to be a permanent characteristic of the human predicament.”
Isaiah Berlin

“The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.”
Alexis de Tocqueville

“Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.”
Martin Luther King Jr.

The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.”
Isaiah Berlin

“A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.”
Richard Rorty

“Once you label me, you negate me.”
Søren Kierkegaard

“If you’re a fish, you don’t know you’re wet.”
Not sure but likely not from a fish

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
Langston Hughes

“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
Sylvia Plath

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
James Baldwin

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
Hannah Arendt

“It is not enough for me to ask question; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?”
Abraham Joshua Heschel