“I am not bound to win, I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to the light I have.”

Abraham Lincoln

“Our concern is with the search for truth. A religious belief can do all sorts of things for us – it can sustain us in life and in the approach of death; it can provide a thread of meaning in what would otherwise be a labyrinth of inanity – but it cannot do these things with integrity unless it is founded on the truth. I have great sympathy with David Pailin when he says that ‘Attempts to defend theism by ignoring the question of truth… are fundamentally atheistic. They worship human wishes rather than ultimate reality.’… The religious believer wishes to be found in the company of honest inquirers and not of polemicists for a cause.”

John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist.

“Why isn’t phonetic spelled the way it sounds?” “Top 15 Taglines From the Internet” in Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 3 No. 4 (Jan/Feb. 2000).

“Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread. At the same time, it means acknowledging that buildings are able to solve no more than fraction of our dissatisfactions or prevent evil from unfolding under their watch.”

Alain de Botton The Architecture of Happiness.

“That first, bloody defeat of a previously invincible superpower in 490 BCE [Persia, at Marathon] has never been forgotten in the West. Nor have the battles that followed it – the heroic last stand of the Spartan 300 at Thermopylae, the crucial victories of the Athenians at sea off Salamis and of the Spartans on land at Plataea…. John Stuart Mill claimed ‘the battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings.’”

A very positive review of Tom Holland’s Persian Fire in Maclean’s December 26 2005 (I did not record the name of the reviewer)

“the purpose of work is the product. The purpose of a brewery is not to create jobs for brewery workers, nor to create dividends for brewery shareholders, nor heaven knows to provide proving grounds for social justice. It is to make beer – the best possible beer at the most competitive possible price.” Ted Byfield in British Columbia Report Dec. 1 1997 (attributing the concept to Dorothy Sayers)

“Reputation is what you are in the limelight; character what you are in the dark. Many a man’s reputation and character would not recognize each other if they met.”

His Honour J. Tudor Rees

“Life is supposed to be a joyful journey. It isn’t supposed to be a hassle.” Woman in a Tony Robbins promotional video on late night television on July 23, 1993