The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave. His fetters fall… freedom and slavery are mental states.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)
Our minds can shape the way a thing will be because we act according to our expectations.
—Federico Fellini (Italian Filmmaker)
Conscience is the spiritual, supernatural principle in man, and it is not of social origin at all. It is rather the perversion and confusion of conscience that is of social origin.
—Nikolai Berdyaev (Russian Philosopher)
A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are.
—William Ellery Channing (American Theologian, Poet)
I cannot take human beings seriously. They seem to me to have been created solely to amuse those who regard them in a certain way.
—Eugene Labiche (French Dramatist)
Art does not lie in copying nature.—Nature furnishes the material by means of which to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.—The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.
—Henry James (American-born British Novelist)
Castles in the air – -they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build as well.
—Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian Playwright)
Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them. They make the impossible happen.
—Robert Jarvik (American Scientist)
We are what we do to change what we are.
—Eduardo Galeano (Uruguayan Journalist)
The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.
—Tom Smothers (American Comedian)
You demand universal suffrage,—I demand universal education to go with it.
—William Edward Forster (British Statesman)
It is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action.
—Stanley Milgram (American Psychologist)
Our questions and answers are in part determined by the historical tradition in which we find ourselves. We apprehend truth from our own source within the historical tradition.
—Karl Jaspers (German Philosopher)