The Great Thoughts: From Abelard to Zola, from Ancient Greece to Contemporary America, the Ideas That Have Shaped the History of the World - Brossura

George Seldes was one of the great muckraking journalists and the author of twenty books, including Witness to a Century.  He began his career as a cub reporter for The Pittsburgh Leader, rose to international correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, and founded his own newspaper, dedicated to the truth.  

George Seldes died at the age of 104 in July 1995.

"...for liberals, black people are to be "included" and "integrated" into "our" society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be "well behaved" and "worthy of acceptance" by "our" way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitutive elements of that life .
--Cornel West Race Matters

"Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren't girls forced to grow up--to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?"
--Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

"We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do  language. That may be the measure of our lives."
--Toni Morrison

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have  you had?"
--Henry James, The Ambassadors

"Sex had everything to do with violence, that was true, and marriage was at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it, as religion was to death, and the laws of physics to the immense quantity of utter emptiness of which the universe was made. But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave."
--Michael Chabon, "House Hunting"