?If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.?
E.B. White, author

?Summer is the time when one sheds one?s tensions with one?s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all?s right with the world.?
Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic, writing in The New York Times

?We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding. Understanding creates love. Love creates patience. And patience creates unity.?
Malcolm X

?The nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had.?
Martin Luther King Jr, quoted in The Sun, (March 2003)

?Naturally, the common people don?t want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.?
Herman G?ring, Nazi leader, recorded by psychologist Gustave Gilbert, who interviewed German defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, published in his book Nuremberg Diary (1947)

?The media have become the mainstream culture in children?s lives. Parents have become the alternative. Americans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition to it.?
Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe columnist

?The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.?
Annie Dillard, writer, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Compiled by Amelia Bauerly, Heather Dewar, and Anne Geske