"We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known." -Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, making her the oldest person to ever receive the honor (Lessing was also only the 11th woman in over 100 years to be awarded the prize). The Golden Notebook, from which this quote comes, is perhaps her most famous work. In the narrative, the line continues: "You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we'll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind."