"To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king... One reason they're good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it's over for them."

-- Tim Wu, in "Google's Gatekeepers", The New York Times Magazine

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves."

-- Edmund Burke, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791

"It is important to see that we don't just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of attack. Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument — attack, defense, counterattack, etc. — reflects this. It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we perform in arguing."

-- George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

"He’s looking a lot more presidential now; he walks a little different."

-- Zariff, in "For Obama and Family, a Personal Transition", The New York Times

"A man's work is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

-- Albert Camus, Betwixt and Between

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Cambodia

"Generosity, unity, sovereignty, justice. The courage to choose, the will to govern. These are the beacons of a liberal politics."

-- Michael Ignatieff, "Speech to the Convention of the Liberal Party of Canada", March 3, 2005

"The new "theory of justice" [by philosopher John Rawls] demands that men counteract the "injustice" of nature by instituting the most obscenely unthinkable injustice among men: deprive "those favored by nature" (i.e., the talented, the intelligent, the creative) of the right to the rewards they produce (i.e., the right to life) — and grant to the incompetent, the stupid, the slothful a right to the effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce, could not imagine, and would not know what to do with."

-- Ayn Rand, "An Untitled Letter", Philosophy: Who Needs It

"For good people are just good, while bad people are bad in all sorts of ways."

-- Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

"Behind the two divergent attitudes of the anthropologist who is a critic at home and a conformist abroad, there lies, then, another contradiction from which he finds it even more difficult to escape. If he wishes to contribute to the improvement of his own community, he must condemn social conditions similar to those he is fighting against, wherever they exist, in which case he relinquishes his objectivity and impartiality. Conversely, the detachment to which he is constrained by moral scrupulousness and scientific accuracy prevents him from criticizing his own society, since he is refraining from judging any one society in order to acquire knowledge of them all. Action within one's own society precludes understanding of other societies, but a thirst for universal understanding involves renouncing all possibility of reform."

-- Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

"We’ve picked bad presidents before, and we’ve survived as a nation, but we will not survive if we lose the institution of marriage."

-- Tony Perkins, in "A Line in the Sand for Same-Sex Marriage Foes", The New York Times