“Life continues to be an Italian opera, adjusted by the censor. The story is absurd, the music irresistible.” George Jonas Beethoven’s Mask (concluding thought in author’s Preface)
“History with all her volumes vast has but one page” Lord Byron, quoted by Richard Weaver The Ethics of Rhetoric (lamenting that phrases like “history proves” and “history shows” no longer carry the weight they once did)
“Do not bother with economics. You will learn nothing from it. Read economic history, and think about it.” Historian Paul Johnson (specifically what he tells senior executives when he lectures to them) in National Review November 4, 1991
“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