“I will not promise not to laugh at a rhinoceros.” G.K. Chesterton in “The Uses of Diversity”, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 3 #5 (March 2000)
“I suggest that we now relax in earnest.” Robert Farrar Capon The Supper of the Lamb
“The belief that contemporaries are aware of what history records as significant is not well-founded, which is why history has on the whole a more balanced view of the past than the past had of itself.” Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence
“Good government flows more from following a few simple rules than knowing the latest in economic research. Finance ministers are better off having read Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose than the Canadian Journal of Economics.” Owen Lippert in Fraser Forum November 1997.
“the chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” Samuel Johnson
“Make no small plans here.” A placard in the office of a two-time cancer survivor Tom Coburn, a doctor and former Republican Congressman and Senator who twice stepped down because he did not believe politicians should hold office indefinitely
“‘If God made everything, did He make the Devil?’ This is the kind of embarrassing question which any child can ask before breakfast, and for which no neat and handy formula is provided in the Parents’ Manuals. In much the same light-hearted manner, a cousin of my own once demanded, ‘Mother, where has yesterday gone to?’ My aunt courageously undertook to find out; but by the time she returned, primed with the opinion of an eminent Oxford philosopher, the inquirer had lost interest and, like jesting Pilate, would not stay for an answer. Late in life, however, the problem of time and the problem of evil become desperately urgent, and it is useless to tell us to run away and play and that we shall understand when we are older. The world has grown hoary, and the questions are still unanswered.” Dorothy Sayers The Mind of the Maker
“They would eat our eyeballs like grapes if they could.” Republican political consultant Kellyanne Conway of her partisan foes, quoted by Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review July 9, 2001