“Maybe I was naive, but I thought the whole point of being an MP was to scrutinise legislation and improve it.”

Source: Shadow Kiss

"A Poem of Difficult Hope".
What Are People For? (1990)
Context: Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out for longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

As quoted in The Routledge Dictionary of Quotations (1987) edited by Robert Andrews

Source: Along for the Ride

http://www.thelivingend.info/band/chris-cheney.php

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Be Here Now (1971)
Context: Before March 6th, which was the day I took Psylocybin, one of the psychedelics, I felt something was wrong in my world, but I couldn't label it in any way so as to get hold of it. I felt that the theories I was teaching in psychology didn't make it, that the psychologists didn't really have a grasp of the human condition, and that the theories I was teaching, which were theories of achievement and anxiety and defense mechanisms and so on, weren't getting to the crux of the matter.
My colleagues and I were 9 to 5 psychologists: we came to work every day and we did our psychology, just like you would do insurance or auto mechanics, and then at 5 we went home and were just as neurotic as we were before we went to work. Somehow, it seemed to me, if all of this theory were right, it should play more intimately into my own life. I understood the requirement of being "objective" for a scientist, but this is a most naive concept in social sciences as we are finding out....
Something was wrong. And the something wrong was that I just didn't know, though I kept feeling all along the way that somebody else must know even though I didn't. The nature of life was a mystery to me. All the stuff I was teaching was just like little molecular bits of stuff but they didn't add up to a feeling anything like wisdom. I was just getting more and more knowledgeable.

Refering to his conclusion to the Barber paradox or Russell&#x27;s paradox. <br class="br">Dijkstra (1985) Where is Russell&#x27;s paradox? http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD923a.html (EWD 923A). <br class="br">1980s

Reach for the Ground: the Downhill Struggle of Jeffrey Bernard (Duckworth: London, 2002) (p. 159)