David Foster Wallace:
In reality, there is no such thing as not voting; you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.[In context, these sentences concern young adults and primary elections. I am taking these sentences out of context to suggest the urgency of voting in any and all elections.]
“Up, Simba: Seven Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2007).
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“. . . it lies within the power as well as the duty of all of us to recognize not only the possibility that we might be wrong but the virtual certainty that on some occasions we are bound to be. The fact that this is so does not absolve us from the duty of having views and putting them forward. But it does make it incumbent upon us to recognize the element of doubt that still surrounds the correctness of these views. And if we do that, we will not be able to lose ourselves in the transports of moral indignation against those who are of opposite opinion and follow a different line, we will put our views forward only with a prayer for forgiveness for the event that we prove to be mistaken.”
−George F Kennan
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