Education

“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one”

–Malcolm Forbes

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“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence”

–Robert Frost

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“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

–William Butler Yeats

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Hate

“The hate grew slowly.  For him it was the only way.  It grew at its own pace, and it grew completely, and it put forth red flowers.  It was the sort of hate no intelligent person ever knows.  It was its own thing.  It was not adulterated by reflection.”

–Richard Bachman, Blaze

Witch

“This was Betty’s place and most likely secured by some sort of magic, despite her pretending to be a retired librarian (not that one can’t be both a librarian and a witch).”

–Terry Griggs, Invisible Ink

Being

“For good or for evil … I do what I am meant for.  It doesn’t matter what we choose.  It simply matters what we are.”

–Mael Mag Och
(David Wellington, Monster Island)

Facts

“A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.”

–Randall Munroe, xkcd

Reasonableness

“There are times when reasonableness is the worst cut of all because if everyone’s being adult and yet the world is still broken, where do you go from there?”

–Michael Marshall, The Upright Man

Skepticism

“Every enthusiast needs a skeptic, or she would run out of control.”

–Michael Flynn, Eifelheim

Protection

“Protect your own force — that was a prime concern.  But if it were the only priority, or the highest priority, nations would keep their armies at home and never commit them to battle at all.”

–Orson Scott Card, Empire

History

“History is never proved, only supposed.  No matter how much evidence you collect, you’re always guessing about cause-and-effect, and assuming things about dead people’s motives.  Since even living people don’t understand their own motives, we’re hardly likely to do any better with the dead.”

–Orson Scott Card, Empire

Dreams

“I want to believe that what underlies all of this is something more intangible than The Human Manifesto: that the ideas within it are merely a psychotic’s way of explaining away the divisions that we seem addicted to.  But then it occurs to me that the book many claim as the first novel, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Years, was written in the aftermath of a disease that swept the whole of Europe, and could have been blamed on the way we live together, cheek by jowl; and that our major forms of entertainment, film and television, both burst into true flower immediately after world wars.  I begin to wonderif fictional landscapes and aspirational schemes became important as soon as we started to live together in towns and cities, and if this explains the birth of organized religions at about the same time.  The more crowded our way of living, the more interdependent we are, and the more important our dreams have become — almost as if all of this is there to bond us together, to help us aspire to something missing, and so to edge us toward a humanity that is more than merely being human. … The closer we’re brought together, the more we seem to understand what we are.”

–Ward Hopkins
(Michael Marshall, The Straw Men)