"Thank heaven, I am bringing to at least one human being the news that is at bottom the only good news to any son of Adam. Your life has not been useless." Adam Wayne to Turnbull, the toy-shop keeper, in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill
"Six centuries is not such a very long time in the history of the world…" Hugh Braun The English Castle
"In their political arrangements, men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time. With regard to futurity, we are to treat it like a ward. We are not so to attempt an improvement of his fortune as to put the capital of his estate at risk." Edmund Burke An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs
"Leadership is the practical application of character" Colonel R. Meinertzhagen, quoted by Cliff Chadderton Excuse Us! Herr Schicklgruber
"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