Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, Ramin Jahanbegloo (2007), p. 159:

Romanticism was basically invented by the Germans, in my opinion, partly as a result of a long humiliation of Germans by the dominant French, as an anti-Enlightenment reaction. (..) For more than two millennia people had believed that every genuine question must have one true answer and one only. After the romantics had done their work it began to be believed that some answers were not to be discovered, but created; that moral and political values are not found but made. (..) Herzen once asked: "Where is the song before it is sung?" Where is the walk before I took and measured what it is? Nowhere. Nowhere before we sang it. Before we created it, it does not exist. So with values, ideals, ways of living—made, created, not discovered. The basic art of original creation as opposed to discovery and analysis—that's a romantic conception. This contradicts the philosophy—the philosophia perennis—of objective values, modern positivists, throughout Western history with no break. (..) As for us, we inherit both these traditions. objective discovery and subjective creation, and oscillate between them, and try vainly to combine them, or ignore their incompatibility.

— Isaiah Berlin