The shabby U.S. presidential campaign in 2016 has reminded me again of how important a values-driven life and career are unless those values demonstrate what Hannah Arendt so aptly characterizes as “the banality of evil.”

Here are a few thought-provoking observations:

Joseph Addison, the Spectator (1854):

“Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.”

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1855):

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Stark Munro Letters (1895):

“The more we progress, the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometric progression. We draw compound interest in the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawn of time.”

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934):

“In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain long enough past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”

Chester Barnard, The Functions of the Executive (1938):

“Organizations endure in proportion to the breadth of morality by which they are governed. Thus the endurance of an organization depends on the quality of its leadership; and that quality derives from the breadth of the morality on which it rests.”

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1943):

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968):

“Man is going to be replaced as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to re-establish, employ, and enjoy his innate ‘comprehensitivity.’ Coping with the totally of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.”