"I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create."
— William Blake

"Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice."
— Ayn Rand

"In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world"
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden, or Life in the Woods)

"Let us remember that we have princes to educate, not only scholars.
"
— Beatrice d'Este

"He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Ognuno vede quello che tu pari, pochi sentono quello che tu se'"
— Niccolo Machiavelli (Il Principe)

"Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance)

"The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death."
— Thomas Paine (The Crisis)

"Lead, follow, or get out of the way."
— Thomas Paine

"The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think."
— Horace Walpole

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting."
— e.e. cummings

"A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
"
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance)

"Insist on yourself; never imitate...Every great man is a unique."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance)

"Before he can remake his society, his society must make him"
— Herbert Spencer

"Or is it your reputation that's bothering you? But look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands. The people who praise us; how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region it takes place. The whole earth a point in space - and most of it uninhabited."
— Marcus Aurelius

"Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks -- those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.
"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard — of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"If I determine the enemy's disposition of forces while I have no perceptible form, I can concentrate my forces while the enemy is fragmented. The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it."
— Sun Tzu

"The prince of darkness is a gentleman.

~Edgar, King Lear
"
— William Shakespeare

"Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper"
— Paul Erdos

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
— Noam Chomsky

"The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions."
— Noam Chomsky

"The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
— William Gibson

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
— William Gibson

"This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this 'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion"
— Jean Baudrillard (The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures)