Justin Lancy

if you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries.

To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium. And if, as Napoleon wrote to Carnot, “the art of government is not to let men go stale,” then it is essentially an art of unbalancing.

a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school . . . it is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

“Art is a journey into the most unknown thing of all—oneself,” architect Louis Kahn stated. “Nobody knows his own frontiers.

Full-blown artistic creativity takes place when a trained and skilled grown-up is able to tap the source of clear, unbroken play-consciousness of the small child within.

The more we are asked to adapt to the biases of our machinery, the less human we become.

There is always a moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in… —Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory

Children have a seemingly innate passion for justice; they don’t have to be taught it. They have to have it beaten out of them, in fact, to end up as properly prejudiced adults.

In an affluent society, the alienated who clamor for power are largely untalented people who cannot make use of the unprecedented opportunities for self-realization, and cannot escape the confrontation with an ineffectual self.