A Meditation on Boundaries, (via quotes I've collected over the past few years)

"I like boundaries, as long as they are fluid."
-Christie May

We have to move beyond the outside–inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits.
– Michel Foucault (‘What is Enlightenment?’)

A triviality is a statement whose opposite is false. However, a great truth is a statement whose opposite may well be another great truth.
-Niels Bohr

Belief in either radicalism or orthodoxy is too simplified a way of viewing things ... Evil is never all evil; goodness on the other hand is often tainted with selfishness.
-Chinua Achebe

Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity. To say that freedom is graven in the nature of man, is to say that man is free because he obeys his nature, or, to put it another way, because he is conditioned by his nature... We must look at it dialectically, and say that man is indeed determined, but that it is open to him to to overcome necessity, and that this act is freedom. Freedom is not a static but dynamic; not a vested interest, but a prize continually to be won.
-Jacques Ellul

Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position.
-Hannah Arendt

Any proof of the syllogism would be absurd. The syllogism is, to put it briefly, nothing but a rule of language to avoid contradiction: at bottom the principle of non-contradiction is a principle of grammar.
-Simone Weil

"Liberty [i.e. the bourgeois conception], therefore is the right to do everything that harms no one else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.... But the [bourgeois] right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself...
Precisely the slavery of civil society is in appearance the greatest freedom because it is in appearance the fully developed independence of the individual, who considers as his own freedom the uncurbed movement, no longer bound by a common bond or by man, of the estranged elements of his life, such as property, industry, religion, etc., whereas actually this is his fully developed slavery and inhumanity."
-Karl Marx

Rules were invented by elders so they could go to bed early. Men who harp on authority only prove they have none. Kings who make speeches about submission reveal they are afraid.
-Gene Edwards

The doctrine of the established Church, its organization, are both very good indeed. Oh, but then our lives: believe me, they are indeed wretched.
-Soren Kirgegaard

"I started skateboardinging the mid-70s and a lot of people thought 'Oh, it's a sport'. But it's not just a sport. Skateboarding was about redefinition. It was like putting on a pair of filtered glasses -- every curb, every sidewalk, every street, every wall had a new definition. I saw the world differently than other people. Everything had completely changed because I was a skateboarder. It really helped me understand the idea of redefining what's been given you. I've always been interested in saying, 'Here's what's been presented, now how does it work and how can it work?' Skateboarding was such an important part of that... "
-Ian MacKaye, (member of Fugazi, Minor Threat, reluctant founder of straight edge, owner/manager of Dischord Records, etc. etc).

"To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision…one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially but simultaneously. In my experience, the more such ambivalences you can hold in your head, the better off you are, intellectually and emotionally. Categorical statements become meaningless. The saddest stories are shot through with humor. You come to tolerate people, ideas, and circumstances wholly at odds with your dreams and desires.”
- Nancy Mairs

We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing.
-Anon