CR,
I probably should have added a few choice pieces of writing lifted off of Steve Solomon’s website (www.soilandhealth.org).
Here are a few to whet your appetite. I think you’ll really dig this guy:
I have irradicable propensities toward independence, the expression of personal sovereignty and the exercise of liberty.
Great dying words: “I do not regret the journey. We took risks; we knew we took them. Things have come out against us. Therefore we have no cause for complaint.” Captain Scott’s journal, written while freezing to death in the Antarctic.
Only the lead dog sees new scenery.
If one wanted a way to evaluate the worth of an individual, it could be done by measuring how much uncertainty a person could tolerate. Most people can’t tolerate much uncertainty at all and will create things to be certain about rather than stand with one foot on a banana peel and the other firmly planted in mid-air.
The apparency is, that an “open-minded” person gives every viewpoint unbiased consideration. But I’ve never succeeded at convincing an “open-minded” person of anything. Give me instead a person with firm opinions, anytime! I’d prefer encountering someone with firmly held views that conflict with my own. At least this person can make up their mind. Someone who can “make” their mind, can change their mind. In actuality, open-mindedness is one of two phenomena: either someone with nothing at all between the ears, so that all thoughts merely go in one earhole and out the other, or, an “open minded” person is one who gives the ideas and viewpoints of others no reality whatsoever.
“Look at a man the way that he is, he only becomes worse. But look at him as if he were what he could be, and then he becomes what he should be.“Goethe.
All this is taken from:
http://www.soilandhealth.org/05steve%27sfolder/0502wisdomofsol.html
Cheers,