“We are no more responsible for the evil thoughts which pass through our minds than a scarecrow (is) for the birds which fly over the seedplot he has to guard; the sole responsibility in each case is to prevent them from settling.” Churton Collins, aphorisms in the English Review (1914).
“So long as the world is inexhaustibly interesting, we have reason to be cheerful.” Theodore Dalrymple in National Post December 27 2003
“The modern idea is that cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what anyone says.”
G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
“the honesty of Partridge was equal to his understanding, and both dealt only in small matters…”
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
“When you boil it all down, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. The deeper, most joyous part [of life] can’t be had by hanging on to everything.”
Scott Stanley, The Power of Commitment
“History ends at least once and occasionally more often in the history of every civilization. As the civilization’s universal state emerges, its people become blinded by what Toynbee called ‘the mirage of immortality’ and convinced that theirs is the final form of human society.”
Samuel Huntington The Clash of Civilizations
“I’m an entrepreneur and a capitalist. I like to spin straw into gold.” Dan Aykroyd, quoted in Ottawa Citizen Jan. 20 2000
Cato the Elder “used to assert, also, that wise men profited more by fools, than fools by wise men; for that the wise men avoided the faults of fools, but that fools would not imitate the good examples of wise men.”
Plutarch Lives