“A society is defined not only by the image it projects to the world, but also by the lives it refuses to abandon.”

“If I abandon this project I would be a man without dreams and I don't want to live like that: I live my life or I end my life with this project.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

“Rome ruled the world with that phalanx formation and Britain with the three-masted ship; America has ruled the world with the moving image and the projection of image around the world.”

Mike Myers (1963) Canadian- British- American actor, comedian, singer, screenwriter, and film producer

“As the journey of "Third Text", a collaborative art project that brings together participants from all over the world, particularly from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, continues, the idea also begins contemplating those land-based projects which were somewhat abandoned in the early seventies.”

Rasheed Araeen (1935) English artist

“Whatever we know about society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society but also of our knowledge of nature.”

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) German sociologist, administration expert, and social systems theorist

“Abandoning open society for fear of terrorism is the only way to be defeated by it.”

Edward Snowden (1983) American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor

“Self-esteem comes from being able to define the world in your own terms and refusing to abide by the judgments of others.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

“Thoreau's disobedience is disobedience as refusal. I won't live in your world. I will live as if your world has ended, as indeed it deserves to end. I will live as if my gesture of refusing your world has destroyed it.”

Curtis White (1951) American academic

“I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.”

Jean Paul Sartre No Exit

“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita