The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling. – H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, 1920

Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. – Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 1941

The mark of highest originality lies in the ability to develop a familiar idea so fruitfully that it would seem no one else would ever have discovered so much to be hidden in it. – Goethe

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things. – George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical