“Each people is, I believe, inclined to believe it is the purpose of history, that all that has happened is leading to now, to this world, this country. Few of us see ourselves as fleeting phantoms on a much wider screen, or that our great cities may someday be dug from the ruins by archaeologists of the future. Surely, the citizens and the rulers of Babylon and Rome did not see themselves as a passing phase. Each in its time believed it was the end-all of the world’s progression. I have no such feeling. Each age is a day that is dying, each one a dream that is fading. Someday, men – or some other intelligent creatures – will stand on the sites of New York or Los Angeles and wonder if anyone ever lived there … Of the hundreds of plays written by Euripides, Aristophanes, Sophocles, and others, we have but a few. At least two hundred plays, whose titles we know, have vanished, and if so many plays, how many books on history, medicine, or other subjects, with probably fewer copies released at the time, are missing?” Louis L’Amour Education of a Wandering Man

“Collectivists can neither ignore nor dismiss irrefutable evidence that free markets produce unprecedented wealth. Instead, they indict the free market system on moral grounds, charging that it is a system that rewards greed and selfishness and creates an unequal distribution of income. Free markets must be defended on moral grounds. We must convince our fellow man there cannot be personal liberty in the absence of free markets, respect for private property rights and rule of law. Even if free markets were not superior wealth producers, the morality of the market would make them the superior alternative.” Walter E. Williams “Foreword” to a 2005 edition of Friedrich Hayek The Road to Serfdom

“That boy was well trained who, when asked why he did not pocket some pears, for nobody was there to see, replied, ‘Yes, there was: I was there to see myself; and I don’t intend ever to see myself do a dishonest thing.’” Samuel Smiles Self-Help

“Yeah, but we're making great time!” Yogi Berra in reply to “Hey Yogi, I think we're lost.”

“But in this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of heaven.” C.S. Lewis Letters to Malcolm

“You can pretend to be serious; you can’t pretend to be witty.” Sacha Guitry

“Happiness in fairyland, like happiness anywhere else, involves an object and even a challenge; we can only admire scenery if we want to get past it. No man can take his ease in Elfland as in the land of the lotus eater. Children are its citizens, and children do not want to take their ease. I hoped to find a castle and an ogre; if I had luck a three-headed ogre, for in Elfland all sport is the defiance of something stronger; our only hunting is the hunting of big game.” G.K. Chesterton in “A Fairy Tale” in Lunacy and Letters

“The record of human cruelty and folly is too hideous for anything but the sense of a corrupted will to come near to a diagnosis.” Northrop Frye The Great Code: The Bible and Literature