Alex

“In dictatorships you need courage to fight evil; in the free world you need courage to see evil.”
― Nathan Sharansky

“WILLIAM OF BASKERVILLE: [after finding the secret room of books in the tower] How many more rooms? Ah! How many more books? No one should be forbidden to consult these books freely.
ADSO OF MELIC: Perhaps they are thought to be too precious, too fragile.
WILLIAM OF BASKERVILLE: No, it's not that, Adso. It's because they often contain a wisdom that is different from ours and ideas that could encourage us to doubt the infallability of the word of God... And doubt, Adso, is the enemy of faith.”
― Eco Umberto, The Name of the Rose

“How would you like to go to Palermo ten days from now?" asked Franz.
"I prefer Geneva," she answered. She was standing in front of her easel examining a work in progress.
"How can you live without seeing Palermo?" asked Franz in an attempt at levity.
"I have seen Palermo," she said.
"You have?" he said with a hint of jealousy.
"A friend of mine once sent me a postcard from there. It's taped up over the toilet. Haven't you noticed?"
Then she told him a story. "Once upon a time, in the early part of the century, there lived a poet. He was so old he had to be taken on walks by his amanuensis. 'Master,' his amanuensis said one day, 'look what's up in the sky! It's the first airplane ever to fly over the city!' 'I have my own picture of it,' said the poet to his amanuensis, without raising his eyes from the ground. Well, I have my own picture of Palermo. It has the same hotels and cars as all cities. And my studio always has new and different pictures.”
― Milan Kundera

“Intellectual freedom is essential -- freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship.”
― Andrei Sakharov