"Victims can be victims and not be innocent." David Rieff, A Bed for the Night (header quotation on Chapter 2 of Carol Off The Ghosts of Medak Pocket)

"First, incentives matter to all human behaviour.... Like it or not, individuals will undertake more of an activity if the costs of that activity are reduced; this holds as much for bureaucrats as it does for profit-maximizing owners of firms." Terry L. Anderson and Donald R. Leal, Free Market Environmentalism

"It is easier to make good men wise than to make bad men good." Henry Fielding, explaining the moral of his novel Tom Jones, quoted by Joseph Schwartz in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 No. 4 (Jan/Feb. 2000)

"Being a professional is doing all the things you love to do on the days when you don’t feel like doing them." Julius "Dr. J" Erving, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Globe and Mail November 15, 2001

"If [his recently deceased wife Joy] 'is not,' then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared. But this must be nonsense; vacuity revealed to whom? Bankruptcy declared to whom? To other boxes of fireworks or clouds of atoms. I will never believe – more strictly, I can’t believe – that one set of physical events could be, or make, a mistake about other sets. No, my real fear is not of materialism. If it were true, we – or what we mistake for 'we' – could get out, get from under the harrow. An overdose of sleeping pills would do it. I am more afraid that we are really rats in a trap. Or, worse still, rats in a laboratory. Someone said, I believe, 'God always geometrizes.' Supposing the truth were 'God always vivisects'?" C.S. Lewis A Grief Observed

"At the sight of Aslan the cheeks of the Telmarine soldiers became the colour of cold gravy..." C.S. Lewis Prince Caspian

"As knowledge increases, wonder deepens." Charles Morgan, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe and Mail April 24, 2013

“History to me is the story of people and how they lived, not just an endless story of dynasty and wars. They are a part of the story, of course…" Louis L’Amour Education of a Wandering Man