"If the way which, as I have shown, leads hither seems very difficult, it can nevertheless be found. It must indeed be difficult since it is so seldom discovered, for if salvation lay ready to hand and could be discovered without great labour, how could it be possible that it should be neglected by almost everybody? But all noble things are as difficult as they are rare."

-- Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

"For the conservative, politics is the art of the possible, not the art of the ideal."

-- Russel Kirk, in The Portable Conservative Reader

Shanghai, China

"In reality, liberals and communitarians share the same problem: what degree of respect must the individual accord to the social order from which he expects a guarantee of his individual rights?

"In political terms, this question removes the 'commandment of silence' which individual currents of liberalism impose upon the question of values. Accordingly, a space for the conversation about values in society opens up once again here, and this space must not be allowed either to be reduced to moral or legal argumentation, or to deteriorate into conflict and the distribution struggle among fixed identities. In ethical terms, only the inclusion of the dimension of values suggested by this question averts the ever present threat of the reduction of justice to a mere utilitarian reciprocity. And, in sociological-empirical terms, this question refers us to the particular conditions under which the values, which are presupposed for the continuity of the democratic polity, originate and can be maintained. Ultimately, the thoughts presented here on the genesis of values must prove themselves in all three areas."

-- Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values

"I don't know a single politician who doesn't mention 10 times a day 'the fight for human rights' or 'violations of human rights'. But because people in the West are not threatened by concentration camps and are free to say and write what they want, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity the more it loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone towards everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights. The world has become man's right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for friendship the right to friendship, the desire to exceed the speed limit and the right to exceed the speed limit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night to right to shout in the street. The unemployed have the right to occupy an expensive food store, the women in fur coats have the right to buy caviar, Brigitte has the right to park on the pavement and everybody, the unemployed, the women in fur coats as well as Brigitte, belongs to the same army of fighters for human rights."

-- Milan Kundera, Immortality

"The exhibit is all about the crack. It’s a really big crack. What are you looking at if you’re not looking at the crack?"

-- Peter Girard, in "Caution: Art Afoot", The New York Times

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion... Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

-- John Adams

Jaipur, India

"What would the photographic record show if it reached back, say 500 years, instead of 180? One answer is that it would show us this same structure over and over again: a fiercely concentrated knot of people hanging on the words of someone at the center of the crowd. And around them? People standing in looser and looser concentrations, until finally — far enough from the epicenter — their attention turns away from history and focuses on the abiding interest of almost anything else. And this is somehow the inherent bias of the camera. It always directs us toward the center of attention, never away to the periphery, even though that is where our attention eventually wanders."

-- Verlyn Klinkenborg, "History and the Problem of Following the Camera’s Gaze", The New York Times

"We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence."

-- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

"Happy people have commitments to causes outside the self."

-- Robert Emmons, in "Let Us Give Thanks. In Writing.", The New York Times

Hanoi, Vietnam