Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.
—Louis D. Brandeis
The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
—A. A. Milne
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
—Oscar Wilde
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
—Charles Austin Beard
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.
—Matsuo Basho
Independence? That's a middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
—George Bernard Shaw
He'd mistaken loneliness for independence, and had become so good at closing himself off from the world that it took an e-mail to remind him what it was like to have a real conversation.
—Jennifer E. Smith in This is What Happy Looks Like
The only thing worse than a man you can't control is a man you can.
—Margo Kaufman
Sometimes you have to steer away from the crowd in order to be a better person.
—Simone Elkeles in Leaving Paradise