Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

The leader, "Not a matter of herism.  matter of endurance.  Your Middlewest is double-Puritan - praire Puritan on top of New England Puritan: bluff frontirersman on the surface, but in its hear it still has the ideal of Plymouth Rock  in a sleet-storm. There's one attack you can make on it, perhaps the only kind that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on looking at one thing after another in your home and church and bank, and ask why it is, and who first laid down the law that it had to be that way.  If enough of us do this impolitely enough, then we'll become civilised in mere twenty thousand years or so, instead of having to wait the two hundred thousand years that my cynical anthropologist friends allow.. Easy,pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives: asking people to define their jobs. That's the most dangerous doctrine I know."

The Diamond Age

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

p283

"Nell", the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the interview was concluding , "the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent.  The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.  They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations - in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overtly straightforward.
"In your Primer you have resources that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life. Your life up to this point has given you all the experience you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those experiences.  If you don't think about them you'll be psychologically unwell. If you do think about them you will become not only well educated but intelligent, and then a few years down the road, you will probably give me cause to wish that I were several decades younger"

William Golding Lord of the Flies

William Golding  Lord of the Flies

Once more that evening Ralph had to adjust his values. Piggy could think. He could go step by step inside that fat head of his, only Piggy was no chief.  But Piggy, for all his ludicrous body, had brains. Ralph was a specialist in thought now, and could recognise thought in another.

The Tree of Knowledge: the Biological Roots of Human Understanding. By Maturana &Varela (1998)

The Tree of Knowledge: the Biological Roots of Human Understanding. By Maturana &Varela (1998)

P23.  In the Bronx Zoo in New York City there is a special pavilion for primates. …..Our attention is drawn, however, to a separate cage at the back of the pavilion. It is enclosed with thick bars and bears a sign that says: “The Most Dangerous Primate in the World.”            

As we look between the bars, we see with surprise our own face; the caption…

The moment of reflection before a mirror is always a peculiar moment: it is the moment when we become aware of that part of ourselves which we cannot see in any other way – as when we reveal the blind spot that shows us our own structure; as when we suppress the blindness that it entails, filling the blank space.  Reflection is a process of knowing how we know.  It is an act of turning back upon ourselves.  It is the only chance we have to discover our blindness and to recognise that the certainties and knowledge of others are, respectively, as overwhelming and tenuous as our own.

Borderliners By Peter Hoeg

Borderliners  By Peter Hoeg 

Through its web the spider did not sense the whole world.  It sensed only that part of it that the web could pick up.  Direction, distance, maybe the approximate weight of its quarry, maybe its size. But certainly not much more.

            Thus, too, with science and its twin, industrial technology.  Physics extends its web out into the universe or down into matter, and thinks it is discovering ever greater slices of reality.

            It might be feared that this is a fallacy, that is what Uexkull was on the verge of believing.  If the spider extended its web further, beyond the seventy-five centimetres, it would still only be able sense what lay in its own and the web’s nature to sense.  It would not find a new reality.  It would discover more of what it already knew.  Of what lay beyond – colours, birds, smells, moles, people, sisters, God, the trigonometric functions, measurement of time, time itself – it would still be hovering in absolute ignorance.

The Instructions by Adam Levin

"I'd been arranged, scholars, by Barnum "Bam" Slokum, who face was unreadable: a pre-smiling king who pandered peace to the weak to keep them from bringing any manner of damage tat might get them stronger to keep them from breaching his peace: Barnum "Bam" Slokum, who claimed we were similar, and then convinced me - if only for a minute, still a minute too long - that I was actually glad about that.
 They rule by their presence, these king-types, I thought.  They dissolve, with their immediacy, all of your emnity.  The Law, like the rest, like everything else, gets blotted out white by their glowing charm. You want when they're near, to follow their rules, to please them, be like them: you want to be like them in order to please them.  That's how you get arranged.  It's how you go robot.
  I don't know what it was that got me more explosive; that I'd failed to be exceptional when faced with such charm, or that I didn't possess that charm myself." p704