“Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them.” Suzanne Necker

“I thus come to the cheerful conclusion that life, including economic life, is still worth living because it is sufficiently unpredictable to be interesting.” E.F. Schumacher Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered

“Nature is full of such miracles, such transformations, that cannot be explained. The dull lie of ‘natural selection,’ as it is conventionally taught — that creatures came to be through blind, random processes of inertia — is contradicted in every moment of actual experience. And in the miracle of consciousness itself, we can know the immanence and transcendence of our God. In every life, there are such memories, such moments — of the dragonfly; of the sparrows; and many less accountable than those, for the miracle one witnessed was not of the kind that would surprise anybody. In my own life I remember, at the age of six, my experience of the purple of a plum, as something standing at the edge of time, offering a glimpse beyond it.” David Warren in Ottawa Citizen April 8 2012

“A thing is funny when – in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening – it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution ... Whatever destroys dignity and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny.” George Orwell

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Oscar Wilde

“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