“A man in a dungeon, not knowing whether sentence has been passed on him, with only an hour left to find out, and that hour enough, once he knows it has been passed, to have it revoked. It would be unnatural for him to spend that hour not finding out whether sentence has been passed but playing piquet.”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they might have been.” William Hazlitt

“if we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud. And, without all the deeper trust in a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect the insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron countenance of fate. What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.” Nathaniel Hawthorne The House of the Seven Gables

“In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for, and against, the same thing at the same time.”

Abraham Lincoln in 1862

“the optimal size of government is government that controls about 10 percent of national income…. Looking back at the period when Britain was ruling the world, at the time of Queen Victoria’s jubilee in 1899, government spending in Britain was about 10 percent of the national income. The church, throughout the centuries, has always favoured tithing. That again is 10 percent. If you look at the experience of the United States, before the Great Depression, except in major wars, total government spending (federal, state, and local), never exceeded about 10 percent of national income. If you look at Hong Kong during its period of real economic freedom, before the Chinese took over, government spending tended to be about 10 to 15 percent of national income….  The size of government is determined not only by what’s recorded as government spending, but also by government rules and regulations. In the United States I would say that half of all spending is controlled by US governments at federal, state, and local levels.”

Milton Friedman (quoted in Fraser Forum May 2002)

“Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold – but so does a hard-boiled egg.” Anonymous

“All rising to great place is by a winding stair…”

Francis Bacon

“The last thing that a man wants to do is the last thing he does.”

Paul Newman’s character Buffalo Bill in the movie Buffalo Bill and the Indians