"No matter how bad things are, you have to remember, either you get killed or you don’t. The rest is just psychology."
His father on living through the Blitz, quoted by David Warren in Ottawa Citizen October 21, 2001
"Lightheartedness is a treasure in a world too full of sorrows." Tor Kelsey in Dick Francis The Edge, quoted in "Gilbert’s Top Dozen Pearls of Detective Wisdom" in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 #3
"Thus we return again to Dostoyevsky’s terrifying little truism: If there is no God, everything is permissible.... The atheist argues: 'If there were a God, how could there be injustice?' To which Pascal replies: 'If there is injustice, there must be true justice for it to be relative to and a defect of; and this true justice is not found on Earth or in man, therefore it must exist in Heaven and God.' Either there or nowhere; and if nowhere, then 'everything is permissible.' But not everything is permissible. Therefore there must be a God." Peter Kreeft Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined & Explained
"The best I can give you is a definite maybe." Sam Goldwyn, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #3 (Dec. 2000)
"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