“Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.”

http://www.popmonk.com/actors/leonardo-dicaprio/quotes-leonardo-dicaprio.htm

Anatol Rapoport Science and the goals of man: a study in semantic orientation. Greenwood Press, 1950/1971. p. 85
1950s

Barely Breathing

Rahim Khan, Ch. 3
Variant: Rahim Khan laughed. “Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.
Source: The Kite Runner (2003)

First Week, Second Day. Compare: "From north to south, from east to west", William Shakespeare, A Winter's Tale, act i. sc. 2.
La Semaine; ou, Création du monde (1578)

Source: The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (1949), Chapter 22, “We Walked in Clouds” (p. 268)

Sir Muhammad Iqbal’s 1930 Presidential Address to the 25th Session of the All-India Muslim League, Allahabad, 29 December 1930 (from University of Columbia website http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_iqbal_1930.html)

Source: The Age of Extremes (1992), Chapter Eleven, Cultural Revolution, p.338-339
Context: The old moral vocabulary of rights and duties, mutual obligations, sin and virtue, sacrifice, conscience, rewards, and penalties, could no longer be translated into the new language of desired gratification. Once such practices and institutions were no longer accepted as part of a way of ordering society that linked people to each other and ensured social cooperation and reproduction, most of their capacity to structure human social life vanished. They were reduced simply expressions of individuals' preferences, and claims that the law should recognize the supremacy of these preferences. Uncertainty and unpredictability impended. Compass needles no longer had a North, maps became useless.

Source: Hamlet