"Hey, I’m not a Pollyanna about the way the world works. Not all the turtles are going to make it to the ocean. That’s not negativism. That’s pragmatism." Dennis Miller The Rants
"Begin by looking at everything from the moral point of view, and you will end by believing in God." Thomas Arnold, famous headmaster of Rugby school and father of Matthew Arnold, quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society
Lincoln County in the New Mexico Territory, in its Wild West days, was the kind of place "where a man would kill you just to see if a gun worked." TV documentary on the "Lincoln County War" famously involving Billy the Kid that aired in Ottawa on December 18, 1998 (as a pedantic rule I try to source my quotations as accurately as possible but sometimes all you get is all I scribbled down at the time)
"it must be remembered, that life consists not in a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments; the greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the performance of our daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures…" Samuel Johnson, quoted in D.J. Enright’s introduction to Johnson's The History of Rasselas
"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