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On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dark-times neither day nor night-the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they cast a mysterious shadow of blue, and it's that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.

William Least Heat-Moon

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Heat-Moon, William Least. Blue Highways. Fawcett Crest, 1982, preface.

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As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Mike Godwin

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Godwin, Mike. "Meme, Counter-Meme." Wired, 1 Oct. 1994.

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If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.

William J. Brennan, Jr.

Eisentadt v. Baird

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Brennan, William J, Jr. United States, Supreme Court. Eisentadt v. Baird. United States Reports, vol. 405, 22 Mar. 1972, pp. 438-472. supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/405/438/.

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To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

John Updike

Self-Consciousness

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Updike, John. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, ch. 4.

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And were an epitaph to be my story
I'd have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I have a lovers quarrel with the world.

Robert Frost

The Lesson for Today

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Frost, Robert. Reading of The Lesson for Today at Harvard University. 20 June 1941, Phi Beta Kappa Society meeting, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

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If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Calvin Coolidge

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Coolidge, Calvin. Speech on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 5 July 1926, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

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A tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race; materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion... A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.

Samuel Eliot Morison

On Americans, specifically "Yankees".

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Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Maritime History of Massachusetts 1783-1860. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921, ch. 2.

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The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.

John R. Searle

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Searle, John R. "Minds, Brains, and Science." Reith Lectures. BBC Radio 4. 1984. Radio.

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Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

Countee Cullen

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Incident

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Original Citation

Cullen, Countee. "Incident." Color. Harper & Brothers, 1925, I. 5.

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Cullen, Countee. "Incident." Countee Cullen: Collected Poems, edited by Major Jackson. Library of America, 2013, I. 5.

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The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.

Henry Beston

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Original Citation

Beston, Henry. The Outermost House. Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1928, ch. 1.

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Beston, Henry. The Outermost House. Holt Paperbacks, 2003, ch. 1.

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As I sit looking out of a window of the building
I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.
I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace,
And envy them-they are so far away from me!
Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule.

John Ashbery

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The Instruction Manual

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Ashbery, John. "The Instruction Manual." Some Trees: Yale Series Of Younger Poets. Yale University Press, 1956, I. 1.

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It is useful to distinguish among four factors which give importance, urgency, and inevitability to the advancement of space technology. The first of these factors is the compelling urge of man to explore and to discover, the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before.

James R. Killian

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Killian, James R. "Introduction to Outer Space." Project Mercury: Man-in-space Program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959. Originally a speech given on 26 Mar. 1958. The White House, Washington, DC, USA.

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No society, certainly not a large and heterogenous one, can fail in time to explode if it is deprived of the arts of compromise, if it knows no ways of muddling through. No good society can be unprincipled; and no viable society can be principle-ridden.

Alexander M. Bickel

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The Least Dangerous Branch

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Bickel, Alexander M. The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics. The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1962, ch. 2.

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The men, women, and children who compose a society at any time are the unconscious depositaries and transmitters of the mores. They inherited them without knowing it; they are molding them unconsciously; they will transmit them involuntarily. The people cannot make the mores. They are made by them.

William Graham Sumner

Folkways

Read Folkways at Project Gutenberg

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Sumner, William Graham. Folkways: A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals. Ginn & Company, 1906, ch. 11.

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Along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today. There are indications that these are organized and ready for concerted action at a favorable opportunity. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken

John DeWitt

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DeWitt, John L. Final Report on the Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast. c. 1942.

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Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

J. Parnell Thomas

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Standard question asked of witnesses testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

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Thomas, J. Parnell. Hearing on communist influences in the motion picture industry. 30 Oct. 1947, Washington, DC, USA.

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"Could a machine think?" my own view is that only a machine could think, and indeed only very special kinds of machines, namely brains and machines that had the same causal powers as brains... Whatever else intentionality is, it is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation, photosynthesis, or any other biological phenomena.

John R. Searle

Minds, Brains, and Programs

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Searle, John R. "Minds, Brains, and Science." Reith Lectures. BBC Radio 4. 1984. Radio.

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It was at the highest point in the arc of a bridge that I became aware suddenly of the depth and bitterness of my feelings about modern life, and of the profoundness of my yearning for a more vivid, simple, and peaceable world.

John Cheever

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Cheever, John. "The Angel of the Bridge." The New Yorker, 13 Oct. 1961.

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Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas.

Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

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Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc.

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Powell, Lewis F., Jr. United States, Supreme Court. Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. United States Reports, vol. 418, 25 June 1974, pp. 323-404. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/418/323/.

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Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

Thomas Wolfe

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Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929, foreword.

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