parresia

Dickens

Dostoyevsky's Mentor (in certain ways)

Here are some quotables I've come across thus far in my reading of Dickens' admitted favorite child, David Copperfield.

But fashions are like human beings. They come in, nobody knows when, why , or how, and they go out, nobody knows when, why, or how. Everything is like life, in my opinion, if you look at it in that point of view.

[he was] as active a creature about everything but his own affairs as ever existed, and never so happy as when he was busy about something that could never be of any profit to him

(speaking of a brutal school master who used to beat the school boys) ...it rises hotly, because I know him to have been an incapable brute, who had no more right to be possessed of the great trust he held, than to be Lord High Admiral, or Commander-in-chief; in either of which capacities, it is probable, that he would have done infinitely less mischief. (this one makes me think of how much damage our public schools are currently doing)