Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s.

— Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise

How do you know that you know the stuff you think you know? Take away the option of answering, “I just do!” and what’s left is epistemology.

— Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar. . .

José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses—is that education may not keep pace with extensions of the franchise, that ignorant voting will substitute a rule by boobs for a rule by the wise. Uneducated masses, Thomas Hobbes reminded us, are as easily influenced by the flummery and flattery of politicians as any ruler is influenced by similar tactics on the part of advisors.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.

— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays

It sometimes feels like we have nothing left to give, and yet, in those dark and desperate moments, we find that if we just keep putting one foot in front of the other, there is a way to accomplish what all reason seems to argue against.

— Angela Duckworth, Grit