"All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone."
— Blaise Pascal
"HE LIKED SHANTA ON SIGHT. Something of the tangled academic about the man—a willingness to entertain the possibility of something, anything, regardless of how likely it actually was. You could see his eyes kindle as he did it, could see them staring off into other places, as if into the coals of a fire. You could sit there and watch him drift, watch him tugged away from the wharf of the real world by the currents in his head."
— from The Cold Commands by Richard K. Morgan
"I am not responsible for actions of the imaginary version of me you have inside your head."
— Teresa Nielsen Hayden
"On two occasions I have been asked,—”Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
— Charles Babbage
plus ça change
By the close of the seventeenth century, the leading clergymen were much more liberal in thought than the elderly uneducated laymen who controlled a great many of the rural congregations or the provincial politicians who often invoked religious fundamentalism because it was popular with the growing electorate.
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, p.63
