“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” — Benjamin Franklin, 18th-century American Founding Father, inventor and statesman (from his autobiography)

“The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in time of great moral crisis.” — Dante Alighieri, 13th/14th-century Italian poet (from the Divine Comedy)

“Indifference is the essence of inhumanity.” — George Bernard Shaw, 19th/20th-century Anglo- Irish dramatist and wit

“Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.” — Ayn Rand, 20th-century Russian/American author and philosopher

“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” — Thomas Carlyle, 19th- century Scots-English historian, author

“Few men think, yet all will have opinions.” — George Berkeley

“Most of one’s life … is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.” — Aldous Huxley, 20th-century English author

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair, 20th-century American author

“Necessity is an interpretation, not a fact.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, 19th-century German philosopher