“My philosophy is that everything is more complicated than you thought.”
--Kwame Anthony Appiah

“Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life. . . .  This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits.  It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.  When the public protests . . . it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth.  We urgently need an end . . . to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts."
--Rachel Carson

“No government can change men’s souls.  The souls of men change governments.”
--Ronald Cartland

“The world is his who can see through its pretension.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The real difficulty in changing any enterprise lies not in developing new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”
-- John Maynard Keynes

“Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them.”
--Abraham Lincoln

“Education is the great engine of personal development. . . . It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”
--Nelson Mandela

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. . . . In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up, or else we all go down, as one people.”
--Franklin D.  Roosevelt

“America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony.”
--Philip Roth

“When there's a schmuck involved, don't take it personally.”
--Calvin Trillin

“Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope.”
--Oscar Wilde