El Tornillo walks the streets of Melo. People in town think he's crazy. He carries a mirror in his hand and he looks at himself with furrowed brow. He doesn't take his eyes off the mirror. 'What are you doing, Tornillo?' 'I'm here,' he says, 'keeping watch on the enemy.'
-Eduardo Galeano
Henry Thoreau was languishing in jail after he had refused to pay the Massachusetts poll tax in 1843 [to protest the Mexican-American war]. Ralph Waldo Emerson came to visit him and asked him why he was there. 'Waldo, why are you NOT here?' said Thoreau.
-Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes
Not all forms of commitment... are equally healthy. The grand inquisitors of the medieval Catholic Church were utterly dedicated to their 'holy' work, and Hitler and many of his associated were fanatically committed to their Nazi doctrines.
-Albert Ellis
The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
-Lorriane Hansberry
I am more afraid of an army of one hundred sheep led by a lion than of an army of one hundred lions led by a sheep.
-Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord
