"If man is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head." G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 20, 1907, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #6 (April-May 2008)
"as messed up as a soup sandwich." Al LaPointe in a letter to the Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal July 14, 2004
"what people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations. It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines. Only when a doubtful outcome is at stake, and one is willing to influence that outcome, can a person really know whether she is in control." Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow
"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