“Men may live to a great age in days of comparative quietness and peaceful progress, without ever having come to grips with the universe, without ever vividly realising the problems and the paradoxes with which human history so often confronts us. We of the twentieth century have been particularly spoiled; for the men of the Old Testament, the ancient Greeks and all our ancestors down to the seventeenth century betray in their philosophy and their outlook a terrible awareness of the chanciness of human life, and the precarious nature of man’s existence in this risky universe.”

Herbert Butterfield

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

“Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.”

Paul the Apostle, 2 Corinthians 9:6

“Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love, and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. This is the foundation of the world.” Leo Tolstoy

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”

John Lubbock

“It is the obligation of citizens in a free society to be able to take offense without demanding protection from the laws, in other words to bear with tolerance the opinions of others that they consider repellent or disgusting. If we treat being offended as a harm in the same way that being run over and injured is a harm, we are destined for the tyranny of enforced silence.”

Theodore Dalrymple

“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.”

Lao Tzu

“What constituents a life well spent? Love and admiration from your fellow men is all anyone can ask.”

Will Rogers

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who wants to destroy a piece of his own heart.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Literally, a technology is a systematic practice or knowledge of an art, and though we almost always apply the term to the scientific and mechanical, there is no reason not to apply it to other human-made techniques for producing desired results. Maybe the best definition would be: A technology is a practice, a technique, or a device for altering the world or the experience of the world.”

Rebecca Solnit, “Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West”