"Marriage always holds your partner's happiness hostage, and the price of ransom is always your development."

-- David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships

"The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself. It must recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us."

-- Max Weber, ""Objectivity" in Social Science and Social Policy", The Methodology of the Social Sciences

"Finally, my friends, mes cheres amis, there's one value we almost never mention on a political podium. But it seems to me a key liberal value, and I learned it from my mother. When my mother passed the pie over the table, she would say, "have a liberal helping". "Liberal" means generous. When my Russian ancestors arrived in Montreal in 1928, they didn't have much of anything apart from what most immigrants have — courage to try a new life, and the hope that their new country would take them in. My Russian family found a home, a pays des iles, a foyer nouveau, un espoir nouveau au Quebec... They were quickly welcomed by the people of Quebec, they spent the rest of their lives in Quebec. They're all there — my Russian grandparents, now my father, my mother, my uncles and aunts, all together in a cemetery on a hillside overlooking the St Francis river. So, if you ask me what Canada means to me, I think of that little graveyard, and I think of the generosity of strangers who became friends.

"Generosity is more than a welcome to strangers. It is an attitude towards ourselves. It means trusting each other, helping without counting the cost, taking risks together. Generosity means leaving our hearts open to others, it means dreaming together that we could be better than we are. That's how this country has always been, and it's the job of this party to keep it like that forever."

-- Michael Ignatieff, "Liberal Values in the 21st Century — A Speech to the Convention of the Liberal Party of Canada", March 3, 2005

"Rights is a child of law; from real law come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from 'law of nature', come imaginary rights... Natural rights is simple non-sense; natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical non-sense, nonsense upon stilts."

-- Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies

"In a culture where rice is so important, such a staple, the rice cooker can bring a kind of liberation for women."

-- Shabnam Rezaei, in "The Steamy Way to Dinner", The New York Times