Justin Lancy

At the heart of this formulation is an essential deceit: that dissent from institutional authority involves a moral or ideological choice, while obedience does not. With that false premise in place, society pays great attention to the motives of dissenters, but none to those who submit to our institutions, either by ensuring that their actions

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of

The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.

You cannot be a magician in stories if you are not a magician in life.

We want to travel the untravelled road. We should learn to tell untold stories; stories that wander off the high road; stories like roads untaken. This is the only cure for the despair that all the stories have been told, that there are no new stories under the sun. All the high road stories have been told, but not the hidden roads stories that

The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else—we are the busiest people in the world.

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker

As Molly Ivins put it, freedom fighters don’t always win, but they are always right.