Date: 1787

"They [the Indians] will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation."

— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)

Date: 1787

"This will in some measure stop the increase of this great political and moral evil, while the minds of our citizens may be ripening for a complete emancipation of human nature."

— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)

Date: 1787

"The young man comparing the conduct, speeches, and pursuits of his father with those of other men, the one watering the rational part of his soul, and the others the concupiscible and irascible, he delivers up the government within himself to a middle power, that which is irascible and fond of c...

— Adams, John (1735-1826)

Date: August 31, 1837

"A strange process too, this, by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: August 31, 1837

"The new deed is yet a part of life, — remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour, it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: 1960

"Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants."

— Quine, W. V. O. (1908-2000)

Date: 2001

"The mind is like those floating islands of vegetation whose roots grasp not the earth but each other."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: December 15, 2015

"I needed to put that on the record because its basic truth was completely lost in a dark land of fear and amid the waving poison ferns in Wolf Blitzer's amygdala."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: July 11 & 18, 2016

"He has Trumpmunity: his notions are so low and have been so many times decried, and yet they keep arriving, in new and escalating varieties, and the liberal imagination wilts."

— Saunders, George (b. 1958)

Date: Dec. 15, 2018

"They found that the most disrupted genes were those for growth factors, proteins that act like a kind of brain fertilizer"

— Friedman, Richard A.