"it is characteristic of political philosophers that they take a sombre view of the human situation: they deal in darkness. Human life in their writings appears, generally not as a feast or even as a journey, but as a predicament..."

Michael Oakeshott “Introduction to Leviathan” in Rationalism in politics and other essays

"To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."

Confucius, anticipating Donald Rumsfeld, quoted in Henry David Thoreau Walden (Project Gutenberg edition)

"a young woman I met recently... went back to school and was taking a basic literacy course. After weeks of discouragement, she found herself one day – for the first time – able to help her seven year-old daughter with her homework. She said it made her believe that you should never be frightened to reach for the moon. Even if you miss, she said, you will be amongst the stars."

Lloyd Axworthy in a speech to the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen March 1995

"I want to taste sugar; I don’t want to be sugar."

"Ramakrishna… in one of his more monotheistic moods" quoted in Huston Smith Why Religion Matters

"Frankly, we don't know whether to run, to watch, or to bark at the moon."

Dan Rather, quoted in "Rather’s Familiar Quotations” in The Atlantic Monthly March 2005

"To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man."

G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Andrew Coyne in Maclean’s Jan. 21, 2008

"Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice. But one may forget that hasty intellectual judgments are equally deplorable."

Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence

"Questionless, there is no perfecter endowment in man than political virtue, and of this Economics is commonly esteemed not the least part…"

Plutarch’s Lives Vol. I p. 481.