On Government Decay

"This American government—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity?"

From Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

On Exhaustion

"I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely."

Sherlock Holmes
From Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four

On Endings ... Or Beginnings?

"Where is the beginning of the end that comes at the end of the beginning?"

Kozma Prutkov

(... but not really. Prutkov was a satirical pen name employed by Leo Tolstoy and his cousins.)

On Contradiction

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

On Freedom of Expression

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."

Noam Chomsky

On the Hell Monster Archeron

"Tundale, an Irish nobleman, envisioned hell as a titanic monster, Archeron, with two sinners propped up in its mouth like caryatid columns to hold the gaping maw (which would allow nine thousand men to pass through at once) open. One of the "pillars" was upside down. The monster had three gullets, all issuing for constant inextinguishable fire and the lamentations of the numberless, devoured condemned. (I imagine this as sounding like a minor, complex chord.) Being dragged inside by a guiding angel, Tundale experienced tears, fog and mist, the crushing sound of teeth, and glacial cold as well as (of course) an unbearable burning sensation."

http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/foster-three-purgatory-poems-vision-of-tundale

From Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings