And thus no force, however great, can pull a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line that shall be absolutely straight.

I have no idea who the original author was, but it was recited in a Writing Excuses Podcast I was listening to, where one of the hosts recited it from an old physics book that’s no longer in print. It was written with no indication that it was supposed to be a poem and surrounded by completely mundane, boring physics text. It was just this one line that, somehow, managed to be written in a beautiful couplet.

And thus no force
however great
can pull a cord
however fine
into a horizontal line
that shall be absolutely straight

They laughed at Columbus and they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Carl Sagan

There is no reason whatever to believe that there is a disembodied reason or that the world comes neatly carved up into categories or that the categories of our mind are the categories of the world.

Philosophy in the Flesh
George Lakoff

That’s the thing with Just Wars - they never end and never will because Justice is a weak god with too many names… no matter what language it spoke, it’s followers could not understand it.

Reaper’s Gale
Steven Erikson

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.

The Closing of the American Mind
Allan Bloom

Think about the people closest to you. There won’t be a soul among them with whom you’ve never disagreed. You know she’s slightly wrong about that, and he’s got that wrong, and don’t get her started on that. The further you travel from those you admire, the more wrong people become until the only conclusion you’re left with is that entire tranches of the human population are stupid, evil or insane. Which leaves you, the single living human who’s right about everything – the perfect point of light, clarity and genius who burns with godlike luminescence at the centre of the universe.

The Science of Storytelling
Will Storr

But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Herman Melville