Paul Valéry

“Politics is the art of stopping people from minding their own business”. –Paul Valéry

James Thurber

“There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else”. –James Thurber

Charles Lamb

“Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength”. –Charles Lamb

Henry Steele Commager

“The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted”. –Henry Steele Commager

Immanuel Kant

“Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee”. –Immanuel Kant

Matthew Arnold

“I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture”. –Matthew Arnold

Hugh Kingsmill

“Writers are idolized not because they love their fellow men, which is never a recommendation and in extreme instances leads to crucifixion, but because their self-love is in tune with current fears and desires, and in giving it expression they are speaking for an inarticulate multitude”. –Hugh Kingsmill

Charles Péguy

“The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors”. –Charles Péguy

George Saintsbury

“Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it”. –George Saintsbury

Stig Dagerman

“I come to understand what purity is: it means to feel something so wholeheartedly that it shrivels up all doubts, all cowardice and all considerations within one”. –Stig Dagerman

Marcel Proust

“We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, and effort which no one can spare us”. –Marcel Proust

Mary Shelley

“It is decided as you may have expected; all judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape”. –Mary Shelley

Jean Giraudoux

“Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom”. –Jean Giraudoux

Jack London

“I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot… The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time”. –Jack London

Robert Southey

“Yet leaving here a name, I trust, That will not perish in the dust”. –Robert Southey

Thomas Carlyle

“Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and it gives in the long run a net result of zero”. –Thomas Carlyle