“The record of human cruelty and folly is too hideous for anything but the sense of a corrupted will to come near to a diagnosis.”

Northrop Frye The Great Code

“Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.” – Henry Hazlitt Economics in One Lesson

“I am not ashamed, as they are, to say I do not know what I do not know.”

Cicero, quoted in Pascal’s Pensées centuries before Donald Rumsfeld was widely derided for making the same point.

“As for your kids, they’ll probably be fine, even if you skip that parenting course. That is, if you dare to have kids at all. But if you believed the experts, who would?” Margaret Wente in Globe and Mail Oct. 19 1999.

“From amid the press of ruddy busy Life, the Pale Messenger beckons silently: wide-spreading interests, projects, salvation of French Monarchies, what thing soever man has on hand, he must suddenly quit it all and go. Wert thou saving French Monarchies; wert thou blacking shoes on the Pont Neuf.”

Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution (on the untimely death of the Comte de Mirabeau from exhaustion)

“Well, he was a bad cook anyway... Dishonest at cards... He wasn’t prone to taking a bath.” One character’s reaction to the death of another in the otherwise mediocre Western film Longarm

“He [Soren Kierkegaard] said that Hegel explained everything in life except how to get through an ordinary day.”

Professor Robert Coles, quoted by Philip Yancey Soul Survivor.

“Today, we are perhaps more acutely aware of the continuity of history. We value the Middle Ages as providing not so much the foundation as the pattern of our civilization. We appreciate more the underlying identity of our twentieth-century way of life with that of our medieval predecessors. We have to study the Middle Ages not merely as a foundation but for their own sake. They were a period when our own constitutional ideals and traditions, which still continue and without which our civilization cannot live, were simply and vigorously expressed.” Bertie Wilkinson CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL ENGLAND 1216-1399, VOL. 1 (Wilkinson was my grandfather)