“Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it’s no worse than it is.”

George Ashley Wilkes in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind

“Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.” George W. Bush speech Sept. 20 2001

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

Thomas Sowell Is Reality Optional?

“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