“Illustrious examples are displayed to our view, that we may imitate as well as admire…. law and liberty cannot rationally become the objects of our love, unless they first become the objects of our knowledge.”

James Wilson, Of the Study of the Law in the United States

“the whole of economics can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

Henry Hazlitt Economics in One Lesson

“There is no better test of a man’s ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong.”

G.K. Chesterton in The Common Man

“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