Matt Fowler: Personal Thoughts from Durham, NC

Ingersoll was the most famous orator in America and almost no one remembers him now. This is the whole of a decent society in one line—the rights you want mean nothing unless you extend them to everyone else.

Twain wrote this at the end of The Innocents Abroad, after five months at sea with a shipload of Americans who mostly went looking for home.

Addams moved into a run-down mansion on Chicago’s West Side in 1889 and stayed the rest of her life. Hull House was built on this idea: the good you keep to yourself is the fragile kind. It only holds once your neighbors have it too. It’s the argument I keep coming back to on housing.

Churchill said this in the House of Commons in 1925, borrowing a line from John Henry Newman, and he had earned it. He changed parties twice and was wrong in public more often than most people get the chance to be. He knew the difference between consistency and stubbornness.

Hundreds of years ago Montaigne met Indigenous Brazilians brought to France and concluded the so-called savages were less barbaric than the Europeans burning each other over doctrine. Today, […]

I have been thinking about a simple proposition: You get to keep a portion of the value you create. At first glance, that sounds like a defense of […]

Precision matters. In writing, in communication, in thought. The almost-right word is a lie dressed up as truth.

Coming home isn’t just returning to a place—it’s returning to yourself. The earth remembers you. The wind knows your name. After the conferences and the travel and the strategy sessions, this is the reminder: you belong here.

School is just one room in the house of education. The real curriculum is everywhere—in work, in relationships, in failure, in books read long after graduation. State-sponsored education isn’t, can’t be, all we learn or seek to learn.

Consensus isn’t truth. The majority has been wrong about slavery, about suffrage, about countless things we now recognize as obvious. When everyone agrees, that’s when you should think hardest.

Fearlessness isn’t courage—it’s recklessness or ignorance. Real courage means feeling the fear and acting anyway. That’s the only kind that matters.

And she would know.