“’This thank you note is gonna be a challenge’ ‘Words don’t do it justice’”
Jon and Garfield contemplating a gift of a hideous clock in "Garfield" in Ottawa Citizen December 27, 2008
"There’s no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there’s no excuse for boredom, ever."
"Viggo Mortensen (1958-), Danish-American actor" quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail September 14, 2011
In my latest National Post column I remind readers that the purpose of a government-run school system is to instill state-approved values in young people, and we should support or oppose it on that basis with our eyes wide open.
“When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, explaining and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, 'licking the earth.’”
Malcolm Muggeridge in "A Twentieth-Century Testimony", quoted by Stephen R. Covey The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic
“‘I can truly say that I have hardly ever been bored in my life… The only glimpse I ever got in my life of the hell of unbearable monotony, of something I felt I would rather die than endure, was in some of those films describing the fast and fashionable life of New York.’”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Unpsychological Age” in Sidelights, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #4 (Jan-Feb. 2006)
“All serious political and moral philosophy, and thus any serious social inquiry, must begin with an understanding of human nature. Though society and its institutions shape man, man’s nature sets limits on the kinds of societies we can have. Cicero said that the nature of law must be founded on the nature of man (a natura hominis discenda est natura juris).”
James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature