“we have lost a vision of man. We are not sure how different he actually is from animal or vegetable or rock or mineral. It is partly, I think, because we have ceased trying to relate ourselves to God: we no longer even cry that God is dead; instead, we have named him an hypothesis, a dream, and turned him over to the laboratory to ‘prove.’ And because we have stopped searching for God we have stopped searching for ultimate meaning, saying there is no purpose in human existence. Hence all is absurdity, all is nothing. The more honest among those who want God ‘proved’ tend to seek uneasy solace in neo-nihilism; or, putting heart above logic, in humanism - while the less honest settle for their own brand of idol worship, sacrificing all to success or skin color or capitalism or communism or their work or their pleasure, whispering, Let’s don’t think about it.”

Lillian Smith Killers of the Dream

"'I can’t do anything about the state of the world, but I can put my own life in order....’”

Tom Rath (the main character) in Sloan Wilson The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit

“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.”

Elliot Carver (the villain) in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies

In my latest National Post column I worry about Boris Johnson being threatened with a "diversity course" to make him like the burka.

'Every man must wear out at least one pair of fools’ shoes."

Charlie Chan, according to a biography of Chan's creator Earl Derr Biggers I found on an AOL group on October 26, 2006

"Our magazine’s habit of pointing this out [that the elite’s myths about Canada are not actually true], and of stubbornly remembering times when things made more sense, causes our critics to say we’re stuck in the past. I can only reply that they are stuck in the present – in most respects a singularly dismal and confining place to be. It’s like having cultural Alzheimer’s."

Link Byfield in Globe & Mail October 25, 1999