“It was as restful as a split lip.” Narrator Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler The Little Sister (re a hotel lobby redecorated in hideous modern style)

“Take any phenomenon you like: take a rose. How will you proceed to solve a rose?” Dorothy Sayers The Mind of the Maker (criticizing the modern tendency to see all of life including public policy as problems to be definitively solved).

“Only the history of free peoples merits our attention; that of men under despotisms is simply a collection of anecdotes.” Sébastian-Roch Nicolas Chamfort

“Man wants liberty to become the man he wants to become. He does so precisely because he does not know what man he will want to become in time.... Man does not want liberty in order to maximize his utility, or that of the society of which he is a part. He wants liberty to become the man he wants to become.” James M. Buchanan in “Natural and Artifactual Man” in What Should Economists Do?

“I had convinced myself, from my earliest years, on the basis of lessons derived from all that I had read, that nothing in life is really worth having except moral decency and reputable behaviour…” Cicero Selected Political Speeches

“A very wise man once said to me that in this life you could often get success, if you didn’t want victory.” Richard Hannay’s friend Sandy Arbuthnot in John Buchan The Three Hostages

“It is surprising how at the bottom of a political problem, some theology can often be found.” James M. Pitsula in The Beaver August-September 2005, re the rival visions of Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan and “Bible Bill” Aberhart in Alberta in the 1930s.

“I’m not tense… just terribly, terribly alert.” One of the “Expressions for women under stress” found on the Internet, quoted in the Globe and Mail March 16 2001