The claim that poetry or other art can somehow supply meaning in our lives when faith has gone "is like saying the wallpaper will save us when the wall has crumbled". T.S. Eliot

"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." E. B. White (quoted on brainyquote.com)

"while a man's sense and conscience, aided by Revelation, are always enough, if earnestly directed, to enable him to discover what is right, neither his sense, nor conscience, nor feeling is ever enough, because they are not intended, to determine for him what is possible. He knows neither his own strength nor that of his fellows, neither the exact dependence to be placed on his allies nor resistance to be expected from his opponents. These are questions respecting which passion may warp his conclusions, and ignorance must limit them; but it is his own fault if either interfere with the apprehension of duty, or the acknowledgment of right." John Ruskin The Seven Lamps of Architecture

"The form of government based on representation, which now gives the political life of the whole civilized world its peculiar character, goes back in its historic origin to the medieval Estates-system of government." Otto Hintze in Bertie Wilkinson The Creation of Mediaeval Parliaments

"If the epistemic argument is well-founded, even a population of socialist saints would be impoverished." John Gray Beyond the New Right

"Action is eloquence." William Shakespeare (Volumnia in Coriolanus; in context it is not entirely good advice)

"Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die." Anonymous, variously attributed.

"Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot." Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America