Ideologies . . . have no heart of their own. They’re the whores and angels of our striving selves.

John Le Carre

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

Albert Camus

“Realistic” people who pursue “practical” aims are rarely as realistic or practical in the long run of life as the dreamers who pursue their dreams.

Hans Selye

When your dreams tire, they go underground / and out of kindness that’s where they stay.

Libby Houston

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled utopian.

Emma Goldman

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau

No nation, no social institution, ever acquired coherence without some sort of fight. Out of the fight come its myths and its heroes.

Thurman Arnold

It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.

Frank Zappa

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

Hannah Arendt

It will be necessary to realize that there is nothing in the world which is not holy. At the same time, we will find out that all our conceptions of what is holy and secular will be as nothing in the light of high holiness, the infinite source.

Rav Kook

The dragon we must slay is no more than the monster of everyday expectations.

Sheldon Kopp

I entered into my inward self and beheld with the eye of my soul . . . the Light Unchangeable.

Saint Augustine

If you cry, “Forward!” you must be sure to make clear the direction in which to go. Don’t you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions?

Anton Chekhov

There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.

Tennessee Williams

Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world as remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and his conniptions.

E. B. White

Question: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: Two. One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.

Prairie Rambler

Sometimes small things are the ones one is grateful for all through life. At a faculty reception . . . a British lady taught me how to tie my shoes with a double knot so that they keep tied more securely and still come apart in a jiffy. Kneeling on the floor in the midst of the chattering sherry-sippers she tied my shoes. I remember her twice a day ever since.

Rudolf Arnheim