“Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It’s my job to put them out of business.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“politics are vulgar when they are not liberalized by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.”

English historian Sir John Seeley (quoted by Canadian Islamic Congress national president Mohamed Elmasry in Globe and Mail June 7 2004)

“It is a law of governance that democracies have to spend themselves dizzy. Citizens of democracies can, after all, tell their government to give them things.”

P.J. O’Rourke Parliament of Whores

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its power of acting and reasoning as fear.”

Edmund Burke

“The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.”

John Foster Dulles

“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