Chris

“How many crooked, out-of-the-way, narrow, impassable, and devious paths has humanity chosen in the attempt to attain eternal truth, while before it the straight road lay open...It is wider and more open and resplendent than all other paths, lying as it does in the full glare of the sun, and lit up by many lights in the night, but men have streamed past it in blind darkness. And how many times...have they still managed to swerve away from it and go astray, have managed in the broad light of day to get into the impassable out-of-the-way places again, have managed again to throw a blinding mist over each other's eyes, and running after will-o'-the-wisps have managed to reach the brink of the precipice only to ask themselves with horror: 'Where is the way out? Where is the road?' The present generation sees everything clearly, it is amazed and laughs at the folly of its ancestors...and self-confidently enters on a fresh set of errors at which their descendants will laugh again later on.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“There's nothing more frightening than a half-baked do-gooder who knows nothing of the world but takes it upon himself to tell the world what's good for it.”
― Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi

“Every tyranny in the world lives - and such systems have always lived - in a perpetual struggle against plain knowledge and illuminating discussion. (The Star-Begotten)”
― H. G. Wells

“I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian: And, Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian