"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge."  --Stephen Hawking

“In man, otherness, which he shares with everything that is, and distinctness, which he shares with everything alive, becomes uniqueness, and human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings.”  --Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, p. 176)

“What’s important to us remains the same. It’s that inside stuff: the need for love and acceptance, and getting to know yourself and your place in the world.”  --Judy Blume

We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a “narrative,” and that this narrative is us, our identities.

If we wish to know about a man, we ask “what is his story — his real, inmost story?” — for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us — through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives — we are each of us unique...

To be ourselves we must have ourselves — possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self."

--Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

“The deaf don't believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing.”  --Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic

"The first time we begin to listen to the cries of those whose strength has been silenced is the first time we refuse to be deafened by dictatorship."  --Prentiss Cooper, “Therefore We Refuse to Listen to the Poets”: Plato, Kaminsky, College Radio, and the Radical Act of Listening to Poetry in a Cynical Republic"

https://medium.com/student-contest-winners/therefore-we-refuse-to-listen-to-the-poets-plato-kaminsky-college-radio-and-the-radical-act-1e92464526a7  (last accessed 12-25-25)

“Silence = violence”