“It is with government, as with medicine. They have both but a choice of evils. Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty: And I repeat that government has but a choice of evils: In making this choice, what ought to be the object of the legislator? He ought to assure himself of two things; first, that in every case, the incidents which he tries to prevent are really evils; and secondly, that if evils, they are greater than those which he employs to prevent them.” Jeremy Bentham

“Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat,’ than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.” C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man

“Man is nailed down – like Christ on the cross – to a grid of paradoxes. He balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out.” Vaclav Havel

“Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.” George Eliot

“Wit is the soul of brevity.” G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Gilbert Magazine July-August 2006

“The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the ‘easy life of the gods’ would be a lifeless life.” Hannah Arendt

“It would be far better, as things now stand, to be charged with heresy, than to fall under the suspicion of lacking historical-mindedness, or of questioning the universal validity of the historical method.” A.V. Dicey The Law of the Constitution

“The game will be no different without me. The school will be no different without me. People say, ‘You know, one thing about that old b***, he told the truth, he didn’t cheat, he did what was best for the kids, and that made him special.’ Well, the truth is, that should not make a man special. I always thought that was the way you were supposed to do it.” Bo Schembechler Mitch Albom, BO.