Prepare yourselves: after reading them you will be completely reassured of your rightness or you will have to reconsider some of your most basic convictions.
“The Scarlett Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
“It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thoughts alone suffice them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action.”
“No man, for any considerable period, can be two-faced: wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
“Jonathan Livingston Seagull” by Richard Bach (1970)
“Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too.”
“Why is it that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a free man that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d just spend a little time practicing?”
“The Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley (1932)
«. . . increased mental endowments impose greater moral responsibility. The more gifted a person is, the more he is capable of decaying others”.
“You look very ill! Have you eaten something bad?
The savage nodded:
- I ate civilization
- What?
- It poisoned me. I was defiled.”
“The Trial” by Franz Kafka (1925)
“Given the senselessness of the whole affair, how could the bureaucracy avoid becoming entirely corrupt?”
“The Code of Laws itself is unalterable, and all interpretations merely express the view of those whom it drives to despair.”
“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury (1953)
“Nowadays a person is like a paper napkin: people blow their noses in it, crumple it and toss in the garbage, take a new one, blow their noses in it, crumple…”
“When I was young I shoved my ignorance in people’s faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.”
“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee (1960)
“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
“There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one.”
“Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe” by Fannie Flagg (1987)
“Eva allowed herself the greatest luxury in life – care not a snap for the opinion of others.”
“People can’t help being what they are any more than a skunk can help being a skunk. Don’t you think if they had their choice they would rather be something else? Sure they would. People are just weak.”
“The Help” by Kathryn Stockett (2009)
“The boundaries are in your heads.”
“I always order the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good.”
“Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis (2003)
- You are a Christian, Chad, right?
- Yup.
- Do you believe in Lord Christ?
- So.
- Have you ever seen him?
- No, I haven’t seen him.
- And have you ever seen how you strike out the batsman?
- Yup.
- So why do you believe in Lord Christ, although you never saw him, but you don’t believe in your ability to strike out the batsmen even if you strike them out all the time?”
“Escape from freedom” by Erich Fromm (1941)
“Never have words been more misused in order to conceal the truth than today. Betrayal of allies is called appeasement, military aggression is camouflaged as defense against attack.”
“The lack of relatedness to values, symbols, patterns, we may call moral aloneness and state that moral aloneness is as intolerable as the physical aloneness, or rather that physical aloneness becomes unbearable only if it implies also moral aloneness.”
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