“They change their skies, but not their souls, who run across the sea.” Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)
“Success is that old ABC - Ability, Breaks, and Courage.” D.P. Diffiné, “The 1993 American Incentive System Almanac”
“It is impossible to live without a metaphysic. The choice that is given us is not between some kind of metaphysic and no metaphysic; it is always between a good metaphysic and a bad metaphysic, a metaphysic that corresponds reasonably closely with observed and inferred reality and one that doesn’t.” Aldous Huxley in “Beliefs” (1937) quoted by John Derbyshire in National Review December 13, 2004
“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