Aaron Wolfe

“Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers--such is the nature of man. And”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“We have the power to decide on our own who we will be. Therefore, we will make mistakes.
However-
We have the power to decide on our own who we will be. There, we can also recover from mistakes.”
― Genzaburo Yoshino, How Do You Live?

“Sometimes it all strikes me as futile. But other times, I don't think what matters is the result. In those moments, I think all that matters is hope. Not the hope the world provides us. I think the only hope there is to be had is the hope we make for ourselves, and the only way I know for us to make it is by being fools. I think sometimes that's the only way hope can be made: some utter fool, doing some hopeless foolish thing, with failure very likely, moving, unexpectably, from the safety of sanity into some hopelessness or other; by being foolish, and moving farther into the foolishness.”
― A.R. Moxon, The Revisionaries