“She stopped. It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.”
The internal monologue of the heroine, Mma Precious Ramotswe, in Alexander McCall Smith The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
“The study of history brings to youth the experience that is lacking to it; it can help the adolescent to overcome his most usual temptation: to be exclusive, to condemn in advance some particular tendency, person, or group; to have a vision of the universe limited only to his own vision (and if only this were a matter merely of adolescents!). At the age when it is important to confront the values received – those of his surroundings, childhood, family, or social milieu – with his own personality, the study of history would enlarge the field of this investigation… By familiarizing oneself with other times, other eras, other civilizations, one acquires the habit of distrusting criteria of one’s own time…”
Régine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle AgesPernoud TMA p. 170.
“What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, then problem which remains is purely one of logic.... This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces.”
Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, 35 (January 1945)
"The smarter you are, the smaller your strike zone."
"Anonymous" quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail November 4, 2010
"always brilliant, sometimes intelligent"
Robert Bourassa's frequently stated verdict on Bernard Landry, quoted by Paul Wells in National Post November 29, 2000
“How could man have such utter contempt for man? Because he had reached the point of contempt for God. Only a godless ideology could plan and carry out the extermination of a whole people."
John Paul II at Yad Vashem, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things October 2000
"Unpleasantries exchanged"
TSN announcer regarding a little shoving match (no fight resulted) in Toronto Maple Leafs - Minnesota North Stars game November 1, 1993
In lecturing to R.A.F. members during World War II “It seemed to me that they did not really believe that we have any reliable knowledge of historic man. But this was often curiously combined with a conviction that we knew a great deal about prehistoric man: doubtless because prehistoric man is labeled ‘science’ (which is reliable) whereas Napoleon or Julius Caesar is labeled as ‘history’ (which is not). Thus a pseudoscientific picture of the ‘caveman’ and a picture of ‘the present’ filled almost the whole of their imaginations; between these, there lay only a shadowy and unimportant region in which the phantasmal shapes of Roman soldiers, stagecoaches, pirates, knights-in-armor, highwaymen, etc., moved in a mist. I had supposed that if my hearers disbelieved the Gospels, they would do so because the Gospels recorded miracles. But my impression is that they disbelieved them simply because they dealt with events that happened a long time ago: that they would be almost as incredulous of the battle of Actium as of the Resurrection – and for the same reason.”
C.S. Lewis, The Grand Miracle