“Habit is second nature.” A favourite quotation of my father John M. Robson, attributed online to Diogenes
“You can’t depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.”
Mark Twain
“Red in tooth and claw, we come at last to a fierce and painful city, to the bloody, unobliging reciprocity in which life lives by death, but still insists that death is robbery. But more, We come home…”
Robert Farrar Capon The Supper of the Lamb
“that proverb of the Greeks, ‘An ape is an ape, though clad in scarlet’”. Erasmus In Praise of Folly
“Believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that your life and temperament have some object on the earth. Believe that you have something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given. Believe that it is possible, even if you are the enemy of the human race, to be the friend of God.” G.K. Chesterton in “The Philosophy of Browning” in Robert Browning, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #7 (June-July 2007)
“You do not always get to choose your enemies. Sometimes your enemies choose you. Recall: This is the ancient story. The peace and freedom, the religious and cultural and scientific creativity of a high civilization, depend finally on the will to maintain order, to vindicate the right, to stop the criminal and insurgent. There is no neutral ground between civilization and barbarism. There is not even a boundary. You are either going up, or you are coming down.” David Warren in Ottawa Citizen March 8 2006
“Mr. [Andrei] Sakharov often said that in today’s world, a moral decision is the most pragmatic decision.” Andrei Piontkovsky in Globe and Mail June 4 2001
“The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future. What is there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage - who can tell? - but truth - truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder - the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as those on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff - with his own inborn strength. Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags - rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No: you want a deliberate belief.” Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness