"Again, in practical matters, the burthen of proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction or prohibition either any limitation of the general freedom of human action or any disqualification or disparity of privilege affecting one person or kind of persons, as compared with others. The a priori presumption is in favour of freedom and impartiality. It is held that there should be no restraint not required by I general good, and that the law should be no respecter of persons but should treat all alike, save where dissimilarity of treatment is required by positive reasons, either of justice or of policy."

- John Stewart Mill, The Subjection of Women

stranger in a strange land

"It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practised mind to
learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether.

The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.

The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has
extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his."

-St. Victor, Didascalicon

disappearing again.

"In his journal entries for 1864 he cited with approbation Casimir Leconte's observation that an eccentric life would develop significant originality in men, and from originality would come great and unusual exploits. Such exploits were their own justification."

- Edward Said, Orientalism

"I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them."

- E.M. Forster, Howard's End

"things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;
mere anarchy is loosed upon the world"

- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

". . . he is continually incomplete but just as continually on the way, the only perfection being a full acceptance of unending incompleteness."

- David L. Barnhill, Basho as Bat: Wayfaring and Antistructure in the Journals of Matsuo Basho

"For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger, for he has a life now that will be no part of mine, and that means that when I see him we will not know each other."

- Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game