“When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’” Sydney Harris

“And not content with making friends with the best Gentlemen in the Empire, he [“the best Gentleman of a village”] goes back in time and communes with the ancients. When one reads the poems and writings of the ancients, can it be right not to know something about them as men? Hence one tries to understand the age in which they lived. This can be described as ‘looking for friends in history’.”

Mencius

“Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.”

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“In order to arrive at what you are not,/ You must go through the way/ In which you are not.”

T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

“You are not ambitious to be something, you are ambitious to do something, and that makes all the difference in a man.”

Henry Kissinger, speaking to William Safire

“Surely what matters in a dogma - religious, political or any other kind - is not the motive of those who advance it, but whether it is true or false.” Ted and Virginia Byfield in British Columbia Report August 18, 1997

“no man feels himself master of his work, unless he can afford to jest about it; and … a frolicsome habit of mind is rather a token of deep, genial, and superabundant vitality, than of a shallow and narrow nature, which can only be earnest and attentive by conscious and serious efforts”

Rev. Charles Kingsley, quoted by John Mercel Robson in “Thirty Years with the Right Project: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill”

“We win half the battle when we make up our minds to take the world as we find it, including the thorns.”

Orison S. Marden