“The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort.” –

C.S. Lewis The Grand Miracle

“I drove back to Hollywood feeling like a short length of chewed string.” narrator Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler The Long Goodbye

“It would not be better for mankind if they were given their desires.” – Eric Hoffer The True Believer

“Take from the altars of the past the fire, not the ashes.”

French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès (quoted by Lawrence Martin in Globe and Mail Jan. 22 2013, in turn quoting Make this Your Canada written in 1943 by socialists David Lewis and Frank Scott).

“too much government in republics is the rock upon which they founder.”

William Jennings Bryan’s father Silas, quoted in Robert W. Cherny, A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan.

“He that resolves to mend hereafter, resolves not to mend now.”

Benjamin Franklin Poor Richard’s Almanack

“The Master said, ‘It is rare for a man to miss the mark through holding on to essentials.’”

Confucius The Analects IV.23

“We sympathize even with the dead, and overlooking what is of real importance in their situation, that awful futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by those circumstances which strike our senses, but can have no influence on their happiness. It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more thought of in this world, but to be obliterated, in a little time, from the affections, and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and relations.”

Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments