“The reigning error of his life, was that he mistook the love for the practice of virtue, and was indeed not so much a good man, as the friend of goodness.”

Samuel Johnson in his Life of Richard Savage

“If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?”

Unknown

“we need to recognize that another religion will have another morality, and that in so far as there is a division of morality, there will be some division of sympathy. The Victorians talked as if religion were not merely a private affair but a family joke; a personal accident that could have no effect at all upon public action.”

G.K. Chesterton “A Modern Bigotry”, in G.K.’s Weekly 19/12/31, reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 17 #8 (July/August 2014)

“I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it. It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn’t.”

G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy

In the 1930s “Britain and France had come to prefer as leaders the rhetoricless businessman type. And while they had emasculated themselves, there appeared an evil lover to whom Europe all but succumbed before the mistake was seen and rectified. For while the world must move, evil rhetoric is of more force than no rhetoric at all… Britain was losing and could only lose until, reaching back in her traditional past, she found a voice [Churchill] which could match his accents with a truer grasp of the potentiality of things. Thus two men conspicuous for passion fought a contest for souls, which the nobler won. But the contest could have been lost by default.”

Richard Weaver The Ethics of Rhetoric

“Mithridate, haranguant contre les Romains, leur reproche surtout les formalités de leur justice.”

Montesquieu L’Esprit Des Lois Livre dix-neuvième

“The economic problem is not one of allocating resources efficiently when everything is known and constant, but of learning how to allocate and reallocate resources in an uncertain and changing world.”

D.T. Armentano Antitrust Policy: The Case for Repeal

“It is only when men become capable of displaying high-minded detachment and disregarding outward circumstance that we cannot help admiring their splendid and imposing qualities.”

Cicero