"The first impression that one gets of a ruler and of his brains is from seeing the men that he has about him."

Machiavelli, quoted in Dan Rather The Palace Guard

"Patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude, and the rarest too... Patience lies at the root of all pleasures, as well as of all powers. Hope herself ceases to be happiness when Impatience companions her."

- John Ruskin, quoted in Samuel Smiles Self-Help

"Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his 1983 Templeton Address re the disastrous history of Russia in the 20th century, quoted in Philip Yancey Soul Survivor

"I don’t have a life, I have a life-style."

Dan Fielding on Night Court (I did not record the broadcast date)

"I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, as part of a generation who were taught the minutiae of 'social history.' There was no wider context to put it in, no framework, no sense of a larger, grander picture. It was plodding and confusing and mind-numbingly dull. It was after I left school that I became interested in history as it is meant to be taught – as a story, as conflict and character, as cause and effect. My approach comes from my own 're-discovery' of Canadian history."

Will Ferguson in a Q&A in The Beaver October-November 2005

"As a profession, we have made a mess of things. It seems to me that this failure of economics to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with our general propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences, an attempt which in our field may lead to serious error…. If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire that full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible."

Friedrich Hayek in his Nobel Prize in Economics acceptance speech, quoted in Brian Lee Crowley Crowley The Road to Equity

"As we want a person to play for pleasure, we want him to think for pleasure."

G. K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Feb. 18 1928, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 16 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2013) p. 44.

"Trying to understand the nature of man without recognizing him as the imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas-relief without recognizing it as a carving of a lion."

J. Budziszewski in First Things June-July 2002