"There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention – that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary – the sunshine, the memories, the future, - which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life." The narrator Marlow in Joseph Conrad Lord Jim

"The mark of a great historical event is that it changes people or, more precisely, the way they think, so that they are never quite the same again." John Kenneth Galbraith The Liberal Hour

"[H.G. Wells] seems to believe that men who have begun anyhow, and come from anywhere, and believe or disbelieve anything, will by some process of pooling impressions arrive at an agreement at the end... I cannot see how this is really consistent with any rational process of thought at all... people who differ at the beginning still differ at the end…’" G.K Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly June 22, 1928, quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 20 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2016)

"If we don’t discipline ourselves the world will do it for us." William Feather

"'When the cart stops,' said Huai-Jang, the Master of Ma-Tsu, 'do you whip the cart or whip the ox?'" Thomas Merton Zen and the Birds of Appetite

"where there is no temple, there shall be no homes" The chorus in T.S. Eliot The Rock

"The quarterback threw the football like a greasy pork chop past a hungry wolf." An unnamed football announcer quoted by my father December 30, 1994

"the two certainties for which the mind of man tirelessly seeks: a reason to live and a reason to die." "Letter to my children" in Whittaker Chambers Witness