“We want not only life but an intense awareness of being alive. The large tendency of our mechanical and standardized civilization is to blunt that awareness by surrounding us with ideas and forms t...”

“But it seems to me inevitable that any person who gives thoughtful and imaginative attention to literature must be awakened in his sensibilities, enlarged in his sympathies, sharpened in his critic...”

“Do you think that romantic love is natural; that the life of trade is honorable; that freedom of worship is desirable? Very likely you think none of those things; you have uncritically absorbed the...”

“We look at each other a second. " I'm tired of the rules," I say. Aibileen chuckles and looks out the window. I realise how thin this revelation must sound to her.”

“In terms of sex between same-sex partners, the objection that "the parts don't fit" doesnt make sense on even the most logical level. If the parts didn't work together, frankly, people wouldn't be ...”

“It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to distance ourselves from our own beliefs so that we can dispassion...”

“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.”

“If only [people] understood that every thought is both false and true! False by one-sidenedness resulting from man's inability to embrace the whole truth, and true as an expression of one fact of h...”

“Ihr redet, wenn ihr aufhrt mit euren Gedanken in Frieden zu sein.”