Patrick Peterson

“but hearing him say just now “codicil to your will that cannot be provoked,” instead of “codicil to your will that cannot be revoked,” he came to believe everything that he’d read about him, and he deemed him one of the most celebrated idiots of our times, and he said to himself that two such crazy men as this master and servant had never been seen before in the world.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Just so,” said Mr. Vholes. So slow, so eager, so bloodless and gaunt, I felt as if Richard were wasting away beneath the eyes of this adviser and there were something of the vampire in him.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“Oh, señor,” said don Antonio, “may God forgive the injury you’ve done to the world in wanting to restore sanity to its most amusing lunatic. Don’t you see, señor, that the benefit of don Quixote’s sanity doesn’t approach the pleasure that his insanity gives? But I imagine that your stratagem won’t be enough to make a man who is so completely mad sane again. If it weren’t uncharitable, I would say that I hope don Quixote never gets better, because with his cure, not only do we lose his own pleasantries, but also those of Sancho Panza, his squire, for either one of them can turn melancholy itself into merriment.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“As an immensely imaginative novelist, not as a philosopher writing a coherent essay, Cervantes embodied in his characters and narrators the most diverse thoughts and actions. So a given passage may present a particular viewpoint, which Cervantes may or may not have shared at one time or under certain circumstances, while the next passage may present another viewpoint, which, again, he may or may not have shared at one time or under certain circumstances. But what all of Cervantes's pages indubitably prove is that he understood many things; and that he could therefore envisage, even more than his ingenioso Don Quijote, many different ways of thinking and acting. So it is with libertarianism.”
― Paul A. Cantor, Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture