Queen Victoria: "You are a genius.” Pianist Vladimir de Pachmann: "Perhaps, Your Majesty, but before that I was a drudge."
Clifton Fadiman, ed, The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes
"Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe."
Euripides, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail April 17, 2013.
"The open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth."
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Jim Hurlbert in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004)
"To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."
Confucius, anticipating Donald Rumsfeld, quoted in Henry David Thoreau Walden (Project Gutenberg edition)
"a young woman I met recently... went back to school and was taking a basic literacy course. After weeks of discouragement, she found herself one day – for the first time – able to help her seven year-old daughter with her homework. She said it made her believe that you should never be frightened to reach for the moon. Even if you miss, she said, you will be amongst the stars."
Lloyd Axworthy in a speech to the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen March 1995
My latest piece in MercatorNet, based on a speech to the Augustine College Summer Conference (and an earlier National Post column and upcoming Dorchester Review article) asks how a society as devoted to "choice" as our own can at the same time so relentlessly restrict choice.
“Leaders have two characteristics: (1) they are going somewhere; (2) they can persuade others to go with them.”
D.P. Diffiné, “The 1993 American Incentive System Almanac”.
In my latest National Post column I say controversies over things like high school dress codes show that we modern sophisticates can't even figure out why we're wandering about half-dressed.