"people who think of the All, and only of the All, have, as far as I have seen, a tendency to become like the worshippers of a tadpole. They are worshipping something heartless, brainless, bodyless, something that is everything and nothing, something that has not the power of giving anyone that shock of reality which we can get from a woman’s face or a sting of pain. They do not love their god as monks love Christ; they do not fear him as savages fear Mumbo-Jumbo. And out of them comes that horrible universalism, that freezing and theoretic philanthropy which is the worst of the modern evils."

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News March 24, 1904, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #5 (March 2004)

"He fell so hard for her, he even lost his balance at the bank."

Kirk Kirkpatrick, quoted in The Write File Quarterly Issue #5, Summer 1995

“Now, observant Jews and Muslims have strict laws governing their diets, but Christians generally do not. Yet here we were, discovering a hidden connection between fidelity to our religion’s demands and the kind of food we ate. As we came to see in time, the separation between our political and moral convictions and the lifestyle choices we made was by and large an illusion. Just as ideas have consequences, so do actions.”

Rod Dreher Crunchy Cons (on discovering that a healthier diet made Catholic family planning work better by making his wife's cycle more normal)

"Our new prime minister recently apologized for the Irish famine. I didn’t know he had caused it. And since we know he didn’t, we can only conclude that he accepts the monstrously dangerous, stupid, and incidentally racist concept of inherited racial guilt. This is political correctness run barking mad."

George Macdonald Fraser in National Review January 26, 1998

"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