Scott

“No living organism can exist isolated from the biotic and abiotic factors that surround it, and its evolutionary success or failure is governed by the extent to which it responds to these factors.”
― John E Hill

“When a person expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd... we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true [to them]. This exercise of imagination enlarges the scope of our thinking and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind.”
― Bertrand Russell

“All the grand sources of human suffering are in a great degree conquerable by human care and effort; and though their conquest is grievously slow, and though a long succession of generations will perish in the breach before the conquest is completed - when this world becomes all that, if will and knowledge were not wanting, it might easily be made - yet every mind to bear a part however small and inconspicuous, in the endeavor, will draw a noble enjoyment from the contest itself, and would not for any brine consent to be without.”
― John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

“Most of us, it seems, have a strong inclination to accept the peculiarities of our social environment as if they were "natural".... that we live in a charmed circle of unchanging taboos, of laws and customs which are felt to be as inevitable as the rising of the sun.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies