“He noticed that his human brothers lacked his discrimination of time and often were forced to wait faster than a Martian would…”
Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
“He looks like he swallowed a safe.”
An ESPN commentator on the St. John’s basketball team’s very solidly built guard Matt Brust, February 2, 1987
“It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program – on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off – than on any positive task.”
Friedrich Hayek The Road to Serfdom
In my latest National Post column I once again use the front page of the newspaper to show the hazards, across a broad range of issues, of entrusting power to sanctimonious fools instead of competent well-rounded people with common sense.
“A man who shows no resentment at being slapped is overwhelmed with insults and forced into need.”
Blaise Pascal Pensées
“a sleeping fool may pass for a wise man.”
One of the minor villains in Sax Rohmer The Trail of Fu Manchu
“Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot/ That it do singe yourself.”
Shakespeare, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“For it is the nature of the many to be ruled by fear rather than by shame, and to refrain from evil not because of the disgrace but because of the punishments. Living under the sway of their feelings, they pursue their own pleasures and the means of obtaining them, and shun the pains that are their opposites; but of that which is fine and truly pleasurable they have not even a conception, because they have never had a taste of it.”
Aristotle Ethics