Push

"I’m interested in what people do with the chaos in their lives and how they respond to it, and simultaneously what they do with what they feel like are limitations. If they push against these limitations, will they wind up in the realm of chaos, or will they push against limitations and wind up in the world of freedom?"
--Philip Roth

Bigger

"The bigger the information media, the less courage and information they allow. Bigness means weakness."
--Eric Sevareid (1959)
American newsman, journalist, author

Possession II

"Kings … will … take possession of the children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents; these they will train in their own habits and laws."
--Plato,
"Republic" (380 B.C.)

Trinkets

"How much of our lives could we buy back if we cherished our lives instead of our trinkets?"
--Gerry Spence,
"Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves In The Twenty-First Century" (1999)

Narrow II

"Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
--George Orwell,
"1984"

Bulwark

"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength our gallant and disciplined army? These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of those may be turned against our liberties, without making us weaker or stronger for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises."
--Abraham Lincoln,
Speech at Edwardsville, Illinois (September 11, 1858)

Past

"The past is a place of reference, not a place of residence; the past is a place of learning, not a place of living."
--Roy T. Bennett

Crumbs

"If, on the other hand, the groups of underdeveloped countries, lured by the siren song of the vested interests of the developed powers which exploit their backwardness, contend futilely among themselves for the crumbs from the tables of the world's mighty, and break the ranks of numerically superior forces...our efforts will have been to no avail."
--Che Guevara,
Speech delivered at the plenary session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva, Switzerland (March 25, 1964)

Best VI

"If this is the best of possible worlds, what are the others?"
--Voltaire

Interplay

"We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and 'success', defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death."
--Chris Hedges,
"Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle"

Safer

"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone."
--John Kenneth Galbraith

Rememberings

"Our task is not so much discovery as re-discovery. What one needs is not so much thinking as remembering. Sometimes it suffices to sit quietly and listen well, when venerable men have thought before us. Constant forgettings of truths once perceived are the very charm of the human mind; the history of human thought is nothing more than the story of these forgettings and rememberings and forgettings again."
--Lin Yutang,
"On the Wisdom of America" (1950)

Incidents

"It is one of the unhappy incidents of the federal system that a self-righteous Supreme Court, acting on its Members' personal view of what would make a 'more perfect Union' (a criterion only slightly more restrictive than a 'more perfect world') can impose its own favored social and economic dispositions nationwide."
--Antonin Scalia,
United States v. Virginia (1996) (dissenting).

Sold II

"Suppose a white man should come to me and say, Joseph, I like your horses. I want to buy them.

I say to him, no, my horses suit me; I will not sell them.

Then he goes to my neighbor and he says, pay me money, and I will sell you Joseph's horses.

The white man returns to me and says, Joseph, I have bought your horses and you must let me have them.

If we sold our lands to the government, this is the way they bought them."

--Chief Joseph, Nez Perce (1840-1904)

Scientist III

"Hans had courage to burn. If he had been willing to knuckle under to the Nazis he would have stayed at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. But Hans was a scientist. He wouldn’t trim his notion of truth to fit political gangsters."
--Robert A. Heinlein,
"Rocket Ship Galileo" (1947)

Comfortable V

"It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions--especially selfish ones."
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
"Peace and Violence" (1973).

Valiant

"Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come."

--William Shakespeare,
"Julius Caesar"

Battle

"Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning."
--Erwin Rommel

Sportsman

"A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to go out and kill something."
--Stephen Leacock

Superiority III

"In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life."
--Bertrand Russell,
"A Free Man's Worship" (1903)

Chance III

"Don't listen to those who say, you taking too big a chance. Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor, and it would surely be rubbed out by today."
--Neil Simon

Herder

"Make government the herder of the flock, and the herder will cull the undesirable sheep."
--A.E. Samaan

Layers

"[A] deep-rooted culture of incompetence and corruption has made it virtually impossible for government to function fairly and efficiently. And because most government employees are shielded by layers of protection, they couldn't care less. Never before in the history of this nation has there been a greater divide between a self-serving federal leviathan and millions of Americans... 'Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,' Ronald Reagan reminded us during his inaugural address in 1981. Nothing's changed since then, with one exception: It's gotten far worse."
--Arnold Ahlert
American columnist
August 4, 2015

Spoke

"We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself."
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Hours

"Well the hours are good...but now that you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy."
--Douglas Adams,
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Trip

"If you can't stand a little sacrifice and you can't stand a trip across the desert with limited water, we're never going to straighten this country out."
--Ross Perot