John

“One day, while walking through the frozen aisle at the grocery story, I saw a bunch of packages with clear labeling: brussels sprouts. I went up to the store manage, whom I knew. "Brussels sprouts offend me!" I told him. "Don't I deserve the right to come into a store and not see a product that offends me?"
He thought about it.
Then he said, "Nobody comes to the grocery store because it doesn't have what they don't want." He paused. "Some people like brussels sprouts."
It's the same with a library.”
― James LaRue, On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the US

“Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had any thing to say. “Tell the tailors,” said he, “to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.” His companion’s prayer is forgotten.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“At sundown, our world comes alive, all nature feeds upon itself. The algae gets eaten by the mullet, the mullet get eaten by the redfish, the redfish get eaten by the pelicans, the pelicans get eaten by the chipmunks. No, I'm only kidding; I don't know what eats the pelicans.”
― Sean Dietrich, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna Be Okay

“Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody’s mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.”
― Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance Of A Liberal Education