"The important borders during the Cold War were seen as those that separated capitalists from communists, Americans from Soviets, East from West. But not to dissidents. Of course, more than anyone else, we were painfully aware of these fault lines because we often paid the price for crossing them… Still, while the fault lines framed the larger geopolitical and ideological contours of the superpower face-off, they failed to capture what for many of us was an even more important threshold – a border that did not separate the world as it was, but rather as it might be. On one side stood those who were prepared to confront evil. On the other stood those who were prepared to appease it."

Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer, The Case for Democracy

“Think before you think.”

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, quoted on www.memorablequotations.com

"an open mind is salutary, but one whose hinge is off?"

"H. Smith" [according to my detailed but now sadly incomprehensible note as to its origin]

"Truth unasserted is a lie unopposed."

George Jonas in the National Post Dec. 11, 2010
 

“Apparently a past to your liking has become an entitlement.”

Thomas Sowell Is Reality Optional?

"the following are the possible ways for the listener to react to the communication: 1. he may accept the speaker and accept his statement; 2. he may accept the speaker but reject his statement; 3. he may reject the speaker but accept his statement; 4. he may reject the speaker and reject his statement. A person with what [Michigan State U.’s Milton] Rokeach calls a ‘closed mind’ is able to have only reactions (1) and (4)…

S.I. Hayakawa Language in Thought and Action

"an open mind, to be sure, should be open at both ends, like the foodpipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake."

Northrop Frye The Great Code

In the modern view "With the Enlightenment… World history was finally brought to its climax, its real new beginning, not in Jerusalem but in Western Europe and America, not in the first century but in the eighteenth. (We may perhaps be allowed a wry smile at the way in which post-Enlightenment thinkers to this day heap scorn upon the apparently ridiculous idea that world history reached its climax in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, while themselves holding a view we already know to be at least equally ridiculous.)"

N.T. Wright The Challenge of Jesus