"A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live."
— Laozi

"God is obviouslt God, and Heaven obviously exsists, and every word spoken here on earth turns heads up there."
— Ted Dekker

"You know what truth is? [...] It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, "Yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth?"
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

"I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashined storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.
(...) I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, with such abominable results: they wre doing their best to live like people invented in story books. this was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for edning short stories and books.
Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
And so on.
Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhapy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. ever person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.
If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

"The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situations. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help is, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)

"Everyone has the right to doubt everything as often as he pleases and the duty to do it at least once. No way of looking at things is too sacred to be reconsidered. No way of doing things is beyond improvement."
— Edward De Bono (The Use of Lateral Thinking)

"I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement.
THerei s nothing else that so kills the ambitions ofa person as criticism from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my appreciation and lavish in my praise"
— Charles Schwab

"[...] when you look at the world, you put on the goggles of custom, habit and tribal wisdom lest the truth make you insane [...] you see the world reflected in your own image; you see yourself reflected to the image of the world (...)"
— David Zindell (The Broken God)

"(...) being right all the time acquires a huge importance in education, and there is this terror of being wrong. The ego is so tied to being right that later on in life you are reluctant to accept that you are ever wrong, because you are defending not the idea but your self-esteem. (...) this terror of being wrong means that people have enormous difficulties in changing ideas."
— Edward De Bono (PO)

"The system will always be defended by those countless people who have enough intellect to defend but not quite enough to innovate."
— Edward De Bono (I Am Right You Are Wrong: From This to the New Renaissance: From Rock Logic to Water Logic)

"There is nothing I need so much as nourishment for my self esteem"
— Alfred Hunt

"Democracy is an excellent way of ensuring that nothing much gets done. There are always interests that might get trampled upon [and no elected politician would wish to make permanent enemies by trampling upon others' interests]."
— Edward De Bono (I Am Right You Are Wrong: From This to the New Renaissance: From Rock Logic to Water Logic)

"Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that."
— Edward De Bono (I Am Right You Are Wrong: From This to the New Renaissance: From Rock Logic to Water Logic)

"For our kind, there's always the burning to be more. (...) that is why true human beings feel more pain. Because we _are_ more, but it's never quite enough - never."
— David Zindell (The Broken God)