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I hold that we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.

— Thornton Wilder The Ides of March (1948)

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Mind

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.

The Matchmaker (1954)

Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense.

Our Town (1938)

Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. ...Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute?

Our Town (1938)

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

The Woman of Andros (1930)

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Thornton Wilder (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.