“Parliamentary government is simply a mild and disguised form of compulsion. We agree to try strength by counting heads instead of breaking heads, but the principle is exactly the same…. The minority gives way not because it is convinced that it is wrong, but because it is convinced that it is a minority.”

James Fitzjames Stephen LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY

“I don’t know what the people think, I only know what they should think.”

Teddy Roosevelt

“We misuse the word sex, saying we ‘have sex’ when we mean coupling, quite as if everybody did not have sex day and night by being either male or female. Our confusion is part of the excess of ideas typical of old civilizations…”

Jacques Barzun From Dawn To Decadence

“Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish - too much handling will spoil it.”

Lao Tzu

“I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only. There is a sanctity in a good man's house which cannot be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins…”

John Ruskin The Seven Lamps of Architecture

“When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.”

Confucius (I first encountered a version of this quotation from Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon)

“The avoidance of idiocy should be the primary and constant concern of every intelligent person. It is mine. I am sometimes successful.”

Nero Wolfe in Rex Stout The Rubber Band

“The man without purpose is like a ship without a rudder – a waif, a nothing, a no man.”

Thomas Carlyle