“Even if it were true that a hundred persons would experience more pleasure from torturing one person than that person would experience pain (in some dreadful utilitarian calculus), such an action would be an abomination. The person is never subordinate to the common good in an instrumental way. Persons are not means but ends, because of the God in Whom they live and Who lives in them.”

Michael Novak Free Persons and the Common Good

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is therefore not an act, but a habit.”

Aristotle

“Our greatest fear should not be of failure ... but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter.” Francis Chan (quoted by Jeff Hayden on Inc. online along with many other excellent maxims)

“God’s ultimate goal for your life on earth is not comfort, but character development.”

Rick Warren The Purpose-Driven Life

“Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”

Jonathan Swift “The Battle of the Books” in A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works

“Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be serious all the time…. In anything that does cover the whole of your life – in your philosophy and your religion – you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness.”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Sept. 1 1906, quoted in Gilbert Magazine

“Of course the historical appetite of people is served, and will continue to be served, with plenty of junk food. Of that professional historians may be aware. Yet the existence of this appetite for history is ignored by many of them – and, alas, by most administrators of educational institutions. Perhaps the most startling evidence of this appetite – perhaps more precisely: of this recent evolution of consciousness – has been the (now at least fifty-year-old) change in the relationship between history and the novel. Within commercial publishing, popular histories have been outselling novels for at least fifty years. It is now accepted that serious biographies belong to history: biographies sell quite well...”

John Lukacs At the End of an Age

“Laws excessive in number and poor in quality not only discredit the law; they also undermine what our ancestors constructed, a relatively stable and spontaneous law of the land, common to all, and based on rules of general application…. legislative bodies are generally indifferent to, or even ignorant of, the basic forms and consistencies of the legal pattern. They impose their will through muddled rules that cannot be applied in general terms; they seek sectional advantage in special rules that destroy the nature of law itself. And it is not only a matter of the generality of the law. Mass fabrication of laws ends by jeopardising the other fundamental requisite of law – certainty. Certainty does not consist only in a precise wording of laws or in their being written down: It is also the long-range certainty that the laws will be lasting. Nor is this all. In practice, the legislative conception of law accustoms those to whom the norms are addressed to accept any and all commands of the State.”

Giovanni Sartori The Theory of Democracy Revisited (quoted by Robert Conquest in Reflections on a Ravaged Century)