“The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

“Man not only dines; he also kills and sacrifices. The room in which he relishes the animal orders lies between slaughterhouse and temple. There are death’s heads at each end of the table of the world. No doubt we would just as soon forget them. Most cookbooks are content to sit in the kitchen and sing songs. Blood is not pretty. But… Man is not simply gourmet, he is carnivore and offerer as well…. Our home ground remains what it has always been: bloody ground and holy ground at once. Inattention explains nothing.”

Robert Farrar Capon The Supper of the Lamb

“A laugh is money in a man’s pocket, because it cuts down the doctor’s bills like anything.”

Mark Twain

“They [typical bureaucrats] were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don’t have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without ever quite being polite and intelligent and knowledgeable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.”

Raymond Chandler The Little Sister

“The preoccupation of the humanities with the past is sometimes made a reproach against them by those who forget that we face the past: it may be shadowy, but it is all that there is.”

Northrop Frye

“Progress mainly depends on the extent to which the strongest and not merely the highest forces of human nature can be utilised for the increase of social good.”

Alfred Marshall

“A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.”

Baltasar Gracian

“He who sacrifices his conscience to ambition burns a picture to obtain the ashes.” Chinese Proverb