Brian Skinner

“When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, on January 1, 1863, Abbott wrote from the front to his aunt to explain that “[t]he president’s proclamation is of course received with universal disgust, particularly the part which enjoins officers to see that it is carried out. You may be sure that we shan’t see to any thing of the kind, having decidedly too much reverence for the constitution.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

“For man's only weapon is courage that flinches not from the gates of Hell itself, and against such not even the legions of Hell can stand.”
― Robert E. Howard, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane

“The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideologues, dogmatists, and bullies—people who think that their rightness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to subscribe to their particular ideology, dogma, or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later, by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

“Before matter can peep forth—as a pebble, a snowflake, or even a subatomic particle—it has to be observed by a living creature.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe