"One other frequent error must be mentioned here. The illusion, namely, that love means necessarily the absence of conflict. Just as it is customary for people to believe that pain and sadness should be avoided under all circumstances, they believe that love means the absence of any conflict. And they find good reasons for this idea in the fact that the struggles around them seem only to be destructive interchanges which bring no good to either one of those concerned. But the reason for this lies in the fact that the "conflicts" of most people are actually attempts to avoid the real conflicts. They are disagreements on minor or superficial matters which by their very nature do not lend themselves to clarification or solution. Real conflicts between two people, those which do not serve to cover up or to project, but which are experienced on the deep level of inner reality to which they belong, are not destructive. They lead to clarification, they produce a catharsis from which both persons emerge with more knowledge and more strength."

-- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

"In a progressive country, change is constant; and the great question is not whether we should resist change, which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines."

-- Benjamin Disraeli, "Speech at Edinburgh on Reform Bill", October 1867

"Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours."

-- Jonathan Rauch, "Caring for Your Introvert", The Atlantic

"[I]n a secularized society that has learned to deal with its complexity consciously and deliberately, the communicative mastery of conflicts constitutes the sole source of solidarity among strangers — strangers who renounce violence and, in the cooperative regulation of their common life, also concede one another the right to remain strangers."

-- Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

"Through the power of a decisive motivation the act proceeds from the fulness of life into finite one-sidedness. No matter how it may have been arrived at, it still expresses only a part of our essence. Potentialities that are contained in this essence are annihilated through the act. Thus the act separates itself from the background of a life context. And without explanation of how circumstances, end, means, and life context are connected in it, it allows no comprehensive determination of the inner realm in which it originated."

-- Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences

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