"That’s the key to comedy; allowing yourself to look stupid." Megan Mullally in Ladies’ Home Journal

"Remember that if the opportunities for great deeds should never come, the opportunities for good deeds are renewed day by day. The thing for us to long for is the goodness, not the glory." F.W. Faber

"There was but one rule [for inclusion in his book]. 'Did the country or the person in question produce a new idea or perform an original act without which the history of the entire human race would have been different?' It was not a question of personal taste. It was a matter of cool, almost mathematical judgement. No race ever played a more picturesque rôle in history than the Mongolians, and no race, from the point of view of achievement or intelligent progress, was of less value to the rest of mankind." Hendrik van Loon The Story of Mankind

"When good economists die, they come back as physicists. When bad economists die, they come back as sociologists. It is an old joke, but class envy is no stranger to academics: Everyone wants to go up-market in the rigour wars." Paul Kedrosky in National Post May 5, 2001

"We can’t always be happy, but we must strive always to be cheerful." Irving Kristol

"I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out." Arthur Hays Sulzberger

"The certainty of a God giving a meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice, and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. 'Everything is permitted' does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions." Albert Camus "The Absurd Man" in The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays

"poor as Job’s turkey" A writer whose name I failed to record in Chronicles magazine May 1994