It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
~Frederwick Douglass

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.
~Goethe

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.
~John Dewey

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.
~Thomas Carlyle

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.
~Magdalena Abakanowicz

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
~Theodore Adorno.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and "mangled mind" leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
~Elizabeth Drew

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
~Saul Alinsky.

If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.
~Matthew 15:14.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
~Arthur Schopenhauer.