Words like “freedom,” “justice,” “democracy” are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
James Baldwin, “The Crusade of Indignation,” The Nation (New York, July 7, 1956), also in The Price of the Ticket (1985).
Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.
Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548).
When the publisher steps out of his legitimate function as a packager and forwarder, he cures people by the millions of the habit of reading books, just as real schoolmarms make windrows of brats permanently allergic to literature by cracking them over the head with the worst of it.
Jack Woodford, The Loud Literary Lamas of New York (1950), p. 47.
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, as used by Alston Chase for the epigraph of Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park (1986).
The defects of the West are innumerable, its crimes and errors very real. But in the end, let’s not forget that we are the only ones to have the possibility of improvement and emancipation that lies in free genius.
Albert Camus, as quoted in Beyond Nihilism: Albert Camus’s Contribution to Political Thought, Fred H. Willhoite, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968).
Todo o homem que merece ser célebre sabe que não vale a pena sê-lo.
Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.
Fernando Pessoa, A Celebridade (1915).
And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood.
Albert Camus, from Resistance, Rebellion and Death (1960).
A essência do universo é a contradição.
Contradiction is the essence of the universe.
Fernando Pessoa, “A Nova Poesia Portuguesa no Seu Aspecto Psicológico,” A Águia, Porto (September 1912).
It is war that wastes a nation’s wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Society, (1905), p. 82.
People who get eyeball arthritis see only what they’re supposed to see, like that TV screen.
Gene Wolfe, in ”Hunter Lake,” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2003; reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Starwater Strains (2005).