The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. — Star Trek

It is a great and beautiful spectacle to see a man somehow emerging from oblivion by his own efforts, dispelling with the light of his reason the shadows in which nature had enveloped him, rising above himself, soaring in his mind right up to the celestial regions, moving, like the sun, with giant strides through the vast extent of the universe, and what is even greater and more difficult, returning to himself in order to study man there and learn of his nature, his obligations, and his end. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

While government and laws take care of the security and the well being of men in groups, the sciences, letters, and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains which weigh men down, snuffing out in them the feeling of that original liberty for which they appear to have been born, and make them love their slavery by turning them into what are called civilized people. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Need has raised thrones; the sciences and the arts have strengthened them. You earthly powers, cherish talents and protect those who nurture them. Civilized people, cultivate them. Happy slaves, to them you owe that refined and delicate taste you take pride in, that softness of character and that urbanity of habits which make dealings among you so sociable and easy, in a word, the appearance of all the virtues without the possession of any. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The good man is an athlete who delights in fighting naked. He despises all those vile ornaments which hamper the use of his strength, the majority of which were invented only to conceal some deformity. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau