“Originality consists not only in doing things differently, but also in ‘doing things better.’” Edward Stedman

“A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, dear boy, or what the dickens is a heaven for?”

The “gentleman thief” Raffles in E.W. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman

“How conscience tells us that we ought to be fair, nobody knows. This we can say: we don’t know it just from being told, we don’t know it from the five senses, and we don’t know it by inference from prior knowledge. We just know it. The knowledge is ‘underived.’… How do we know that we exist? No one knows. Not so, you say. I think, therefore I exist. But how do you know that you think? No one knows that either. You just do.”

J. Budziszewski What We Can’t Not Know

“scarier than ten nights in a graveyard.”

John Simon in National Review December 6 1999, praising an actor’s creepy performance

“Abandon hopelessness, all ye who enter here.” G.K. Chesterton in Charles Dickens, quoted in Gilbert Magazine July-August 2007

“All history is contemporary history.” Benedotto Croce

“Not believing in the marketplace is like not believing in gravity.” P.J. O’Rourke in Ottawa Citizen March 18 2000

“’In my experience,’ he told me, ‘if you run away from a thing just because you don’t like it, you don’t like what you find either. Now, running to a thing, that’s a different matter, but what would you want to run to?’” The narrator’s wise uncle Axel in John Wyndham The Chrysalids