"The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought."

-- Stewart Brand, in "An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New 'Heresies'", The New York Times

"There is nothing more reassuringly traditionalist than the counterculture. For 30 years, the music, the fashions, the poses and the urban weeklies have all been the same. Everything in this society changes except nonconformity."

-- David Brooks, "Mosh Pit Meets Sandbox", The New York Times

"Concepts such as "individual" and "society" do not relate to two objects existing separately but to different yet inseparable aspects of the same human beings... Both have the character of processes... The relations between individual and social structures can only be clarified if both are investigated as changing, evolving entities... The relation between what is referred to conceptually as the "individual" and as "society" will remain incomprehensible so long as these concepts are used as if they represented two separate bodies, and even bodies normally at rest, which only come into contact with one another afterwards as it were."

-- Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process

"His decision to memorize and recite the digits of pi was an important turning point. Racked by nervousness the night before the recitation, he fell into a deep sleep and dreamed that he was walking through the landscape of pi — that he was actually deep inside the number, enveloped by its sights and colors and textures."

-- Sarah Lyall, "Brainman, at Rest in His Oasis", The New York Times

"A witty saying proves nothing."

-- Voltaire

Pai, Thailand

"For many students, the main axis of their politics is not between left and right but between idealism and realism. They have developed a suspicion of sweepingly idealistic political ventures, and are now a fascinating mixture of youthful hopefulness and antiutopian modesty...

"Many showed a visceral distaste for people who are overly certain or unable to see some truth in the other side. One student, Meng Zhou, quoted one of our readings from Reinhold Niebuhr: 'A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice.' Another, Kevin Troy, cited a passage from Max Weber's essay 'Politics as a Vocation': 'Politics means slow, powerful drilling through hard boards, with a mixture of passion and sense of proportion.'

"If my Duke students are representative, then the U.S. is about to see a generation that is practical, anti-ideological, modest and centrist (maybe to a fault)."

-- David Brooks, "Children of Polarization", The New York Times

"To which powers has a man given himself in order to solve the paradoxes of life? On what kind of objective structure has he strung out his meanings and fenced off his own free energies? ... Each person lives his version of the real without knowing it, by giving his whole uncritical allegiance to some kind of model of power."

-- Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning

"The fact is that the human animal is distinctively characterized, as a species and from the start, by the drive to produce a surplus... There is something in the human psyche which commits man to nonenjoyment, to work."

-- Norman Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History