Quotes: Kant. Kennedy. Kin. King. King Arthur. Knight Errantry. Knitting.

A collection of quotes. The sentence in bold face is a plain statement of the quote that follows.

Kant.
Kant showed that the mind is not a passive recipient of experience, but selects and constructs its perception of experience.
Kant 287 The great achievement of Kant is to have shown, once for all, that the external world is known to us only as sensation; and that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa, the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Kant.

Kennedy
JFK changed the world’s perception of the U.S. as a country run by old men who were fearful of ideas, change and the future.
Kennedy 940 Of JFK:…wiping away the world’s impression of an old nation of old men, weary, played out, fearful of ideas, change and the future….. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days

JFK gave people a sense of hope and the possibilities of life.
Kennedy 940 Of JFK: Above all he gave the world for an imperishable moment the vision of a leader who greatly understood the terror and the hope, the diversity and the possibility, of life on this planet and who made people look beyond nation and race to the future of humanity. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days

Kin
People who experience the same fate are closer than ties of birth.
Kin 301 Is not the kindred of a common fate a closer tie than that of birth? Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches

King
Kings are oppressed by constraints.
King 46 Creon: …but, once a king, all hedged in by constraint. Sophocles. Oedipus the King.

King Arthur
King Arthur channeled aggression into using it for good purposes.
King Arthur 418 Arthur: When I started the Table, it was to stop anarchy…a channel for brute force, so that the people who had to use force could be made to do it in a useful way. T. H. White, The Once and Future King.

Force is the mental illness of a humanity that is basically decent.
King Arthur 621 The service for which he [Arthur] had been destined had been against Force, the mental illness of humanity…but the whole structure depended on the first premise: that man was decent. T. H. White, The Once and Future King.

Force should not be used as an end in itself, but on behalf of justice.
King Arthur 628 Now this king had an idea, and the idea was that Force ought to be used, if it were used at all, on behalf of justice, not on its own account…thought that if he could get his barons fighting for truth, and to help weak people, and to redress wrongs, then their fighting might not be such a bad thing as once it used to be. T. H. White, The Once and Future King.

Knight Errantry
The problems of being a knight-errant.
Knight-errantry 18 First you have to stop to unwind the brachet [hound that hunts by scent], then your visor falls down, then you can’t see through your spectacles; no where to sleep, never know where you are; rheumatism in the winter, sunstroke in the summer…this horrid armor takes hours to put on…either frying or freezing, and it gets rusty…have to sit up all night polishing the stuff. T. H. White, The Once and Future King.

Knitting
He knitted into his tapestry the skirmish of Fin Macoul.
Knitting 224 …Shemus’s needle flew through the tartan like lightning, and as the artist kept chanting some dreadful skirmish of Fin Macoul, he accomplished at least three stitches to the death of every hero. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley.