Facts are like cows, if you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.

Bunter’s mother in Clouds of Witness, Dorothy Sayers
 

True ambivalence: not feeling unsure, but feeling opposing extremes of conviction at once....ambivalence holds more information than any single emotion.

Rivka Galchen, "Dream Machine" The New Yorker (May 2, 2011)

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, "Sir, I am your most humble servant." You are not his must humble servant. You may say, "These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved at such times." You don't mind the times. You tell a man, "I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet." You don't care six-pence whether he is wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society: but don't think foolishly.

....

I sometimes say more than I mean, in jest; and people are apt to believe me serious: however, I am more candid than I was when I was younger. As I know more of mankind, I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly.


Samuel Johnson (1783) in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson