More important than your obligation to follow your conscience—or at least prior to it—is your obligation to form your conscience correctly.  –Antonin Scalia

A man died on the road outside my subdivision.  And I have a really good ghost story.  And yet... We are not products of our experiences.  We are products of our decisions.

“The desire for explanation always outruns the recognition of explanatory power.  The illusion of understanding is more important for most men than understanding itself.  And what counts as an understanding today will be revealed tomorrow as an illusion, often so gross that people will wonder how anyone came to believe it.  Conduct that was once attributed to the devil will be attributed by successive generations to a deficient or excessive phrenological bump, to an unresolved Oedipus complex, to bad conditioning, to faulty brain chemistry, to unfortunate genes, or to a part of the brain that fails to light up on fMRI scans when appropriately provoked.  The illusion of understanding is like the grin of the Cheshire Cat:  it is what remains when all else has disappeared.”  -Theodore Dalrymple

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -George Orwell

"It would probably be rude to ask, but I’m sure none of [the Afghan refugees] support sharia law, hate gays or Jews, or favor the death penalty for apostasy. People are really the same everywhere on earth, regardless of beliefs."  -Racist

"The right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended. The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness - and the other represents oppression.” -Rowan Atkinson

“Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.” -Mark Twain

Ryan Reilly doesn't know what ear plugs are.

Mara Gay and Brian Williams Can't do Math.

"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” -Abraham Lincoln

"I am not a reformer. I think there is entirely too much attempt at reforming in the world and that we pay too much attention to reformers. We have two kinds of reformers. Both are nuisances. The man who calls himself a reformer wants to smash things. He is the sort of man who would tear up a whole shirt because the collar button did not fit the buttonhole. It would never occur to him to enlarge the buttonhole. This sort of reformer never under any circumstances knows what he is doing. Experience and reform do not go together. A reformer cannot keep his zeal at white heat in the presence of a fact."  -Henry Ford

"Like, 9/10ths of the way to being a Nazi himself."  -Glau from Twitter

"This is your dog whistle for white supremacists."  -Chris from Twitter

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."  -Teddy Roosevelt

“One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” –Nikole Hannah-Jones

"Virginia’s many appeals to end slave importations brought nothing but rejections from the three Georges who mounted the British throne in succession." -Unger

Stop blaming people (or nations) you don't like for things they didn't do.

“Your cause of sorrow must not be measured by his worth, for then it hath no end.” -Shakespeare

"'Because she is in God's hands.' But if so, she was in God's hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body and if so, why? If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death is unendurably as before it.”  -C. S. Lewis

"He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong."  -Auden