We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. – Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man

The reputations of the nineteenth century will one day be quoted to prove its barbarism. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Uses of Great Men” (lecture)

Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever? – Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol III, book V, chapter 7