"Achieving justice in our own time is a task that taxes the resources of even the best societies. We should leave the past in the past." Thomas Sowell Is Reality Optional?
Some people use "statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination." Andrew Lang quoted in Scott Reid Lament for a Notion
"This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries." Robertson Davies Fifth Business
"Sometimes even in the middle of doing something, we must think in reverse, as when C.S. Lewis suggests the analogy of a math sum gone awry: until you go back to the place where the mistake was made, no further amount of ciphering will help." Robert Moore-Jumonville in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #8 (Issue 57, July-August 2004)
"Suddenly it becomes evident that things which for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be manufacture right here on earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods of destruction and therapy. To these people (and they are more numerous in any large city than we like to admit) the totalitarian hell proves only that the power of man is greater than they ever dared to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the earth open…. Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgement: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope." Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, with specific reference to film footage from Nazi concentration camps
"Deja voodoo, the feeling that you have been cursed before." R.G. McGillivray, Oakville, Ont., in "SMILE" in Globe and Mail April 19, 2002
"Eleanor [his wife] and I speak at various conferences; we know so many people who, if they had to do it over again, would never have left their first marriage. The grass always looks greener on the other side. But the grass is greenest where you water it most." Paul Henderson in an interview in Cardus Convivium Vol. I #5 (November-December 2012)
"It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts." Bill Vaughan, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Social Studies in Globe and Mail June 1, 2009