The gap between intention and interpretation is always rife with wrongs, especially when writer and reader occupy vastly different strata of emotiona… - Maria Popova

The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.

We go through life seeing reality not as it really is, in its unfathomable depths of complexity and contradiction, but as we hope or fear or expect it to be. Too often, we confuse certainty for truth and the strength of our beliefs for the strength of the evidence. When we collide with the unexpected, with the antipode to our hopes, we are plunged into bewildered despair. We rise from the pit only by love. Perhaps Keats had it slightly wrong — perhaps truth is love and love is truth.

The lazy hand grenade of “spinster” had been thrown and would be thrown at Carson many times, having been clenched in the unevolved fist of culture for more than a century since the landmark Woman’s Rights Convention was derided as comprising “old maids, whose personal charms were never very attractive.