Chad

“He who says "Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe... This fear he slavishly obeys... For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world... It is like a general informing his soliders that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not so awfully solumn things. In a world where we are certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.”
― William James, The Will to Believe, Human Immortality and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

“The vital aspect of the electoral college was that it got the Convention over the hurdle and protected everybody's interest. The future was left to cope with the problem of what to do with this Rube Goldberg mechanism... The Electoral College was neither an exercise in applied Platonism nor an experiment in indirect government based on elitist distrust of the masses. It was merely a jerry-rigged improvisation which has subsequently been endowed with a high theoretical content.”
― John Roche

“It is not only the unit vote for the Presidency we are talking about, but a whole solar system of governmental power. If it is proposed to change the balance of power of one of the elements of the solar system, it is necessary to consider the others.”
― John F Kennedy

“The actual rewards that come from arguing with other people have nothing to do with winning and losing. A good argument helps us refine our own ideas and discover where our reasoning is the weakest. Other people's opposition can help us turn our own half-formed ideas into clear assertions backed by solid reasoning. And setting our ideas and opinions against someone else's helps us know each other better, which makes us better friends. We get these benefits from arguments when we collaborate with a partner. We do not get them when we try to destroy an enemy. That is how non-zero-sum games work.”
― Michael Austin, We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition