Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Ralph Waldo Emerson A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand. Bertrand Russell

Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. –Hermann Goering, Luftwaffe Commander, Nuremberg Trials 1946, from Nuremberg Diary by G M Gilbert (Signet, New York, 1947)

The “real world” in which we find ourselves, then—the very world our sciences strive to fathom—is not a sheer “object,” not a fixed and finished “datum” from which all subjects and subjective qualities could be pared away, but is rather an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through from many different angles. The mutual inscription of others in my experience, and (as I must assume) of myself in their experiences, affects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or “reality.” David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

To touch the coarse skin of a tree is thus, at the same time, to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree. And to see the world is also, at the same time, to experience oneself as visible, to feel oneself seen. Clearly, a wholly immaterial mind could neither see things nor touch things—indeed, could not experience anything at all. We can experience things—can touch, hear, and taste things—only because, as bodies, we are ourselves included in the sensible field, and have our own textures, sounds, and tastes. We can perceive things at all only because we ourselves are entirely a part of the sensible world that we perceive! We might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself through us. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. --Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a Science”

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. Anatole France ( )

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate. –Lydia Maria Child

The more we take the welfare of others to heart and work for their benefit, the more benefit we derive for ourselves. This is a fact we can see. And the more selfish we remain and self-centered, the more selfish our way of life is, the lonelier we feel and the more miserable. This is also a fact we can see. –The Dalai Lama

Cowards die many times before their deaths, The valiant never taste of death but once. William Shakespeare

It is an established opinion amongst some men that there are in the understanding certain innate principles, some primary notions, characters, as it were, stamped upon the mind of man, which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Those who have affirmed that the soul is distinguished from the body, is immaterial, draws its ideas from its own peculiar source, acts by its own energies, without the aid of any exterior object, have liberated it from those physical laws according to which all beings of which we have knowledge are obliged to act. Baron d’Holback, “Of the System of Man’s Free Agency”