“If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

Economist Ely Devons “via economist Ronald Coase via economist Hernado de Soto” according to William Watson in National Post December 29, 2001

“As for being remembered, well, I always thought that was an odd question. I don’t want to be remembered for anything other than what I’m trying to do right now: be a person of some honesty and integrity and reasonable intelligence, who loves his work, makes a lot of friends, and maybe does some good with young people.”

Bo Schembechler and Mitch Albom BO

“What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.”

Mignon McLaughlin, American journalist and author of the Neurotic’s Notebook series

“It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.” G.K. Chesterton in Charles Dickens

“Wit is a fighting thing and a working thing.”

G.K. Chesterton in praise of Mark Twain on the latter’s death according to Gilbert! Vol. 5 #8 (July/August 2002)

“Unhurt people are not much good in the world.”

Irish literary critic Enid Starkie, quoted in “Social Studies” in the Globe and Mail Dec. 11, 2007 (parenthetically, I would not have thought there were enough of them for it to matter)

“The first edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy published in 1694, defined history as the ‘narration of actions and of matters worth remembering.’ The eighth edition, in 1935, said much the same: ‘the account of acts, of events, of matters worth remembering.’”

John Lukacs At the End of an Age p. 51n [oddly, in this otherwise excellent book, Lukacs indignantly rejects this definition – but for once I’m with the French Academy on this one].

“economist, n. a scoundrel whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. – after Ambrose Bierce”

Daniel K. Benjamin in PERC Reports Vol. 17 # 5 (12/99) p. 16 [Bierce, himself one, had defined a “cynic” that way in his Devil’s Dictionary].