“The state consists of coercion; and must always be justified from its own point of view in extending the bounds of coercion…”

G.K. Chesterton The Superstition of Divorce

“Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.”

Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts

“There is an old saying: Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks.”

George W. Bush 2^nd electoral victory speech Nov. 3 2004

“I was learning the far more secret doctrine that pleasures are shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility…. But aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures? Certainly there are. But in calling them ‘bad pleasures’ I take it we are using a kind of shorthand. We mean ‘pleasures snatched by unlawful acts.’ It is the stealing of the apple that is bad, not the sweetness. The sweetness is still a beam from the glory. That does not palliate the stealing. It makes it worse. There is sacrilege in the theft. We have abused a holy thing. I have tried, since that moment, to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration.”

C.S. Lewis Letters to Malcolm

“Yes, there are conferences on the scientific basis of humor, of fun (‘funology’ is the name given to this particular endeavour), but this is a difficult topic and progress is slow.”

Donald A. Norman Emotional Design

“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