"The object of philanthropy is to do good; the object of religion is to be good, if only for a moment, amid a crash of brass."

G.K. Chesterton in Heretics
GKC Heretics

"I sleep like a baby, too. Every two hours, I wake up screaming."

Then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, re reports that President George W. Bush had slept like a baby in the runup to the Iraq war, quoted in Globe and Mail Nov. 16, 2004 (I swear I thought of this joke years earlier but Powell beat me into print and may himself have come up with the gag long before)

"[T]he only thing in life which is interesting is truth, and the only thing in life which is admirable is goodness."

Malcolm Muggeridge "About Kingsmill" in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge

"A common error, however, is to regard the civilizing process and the humanizing process as synonymous. A correlation between the two has yet to be demonstrated. (The first glance was enough to let you see the flabby devil was running that show.)"

Mark Slade in Mosaic magazine (re Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), quoted in Marshall McLuhan “Man and Media” in McLuhan Understanding Me 295.
 

"I can listen patiently to a Communist repeating for hours at a time that Property is unnecessary, because men must surrender selfish interests to social ideals. I only begin to break the furniture when somebody starts to prove that Property is necessary, because men are all selfish and every man must look after himself. The case for Property is not that a man must look after himself; but, on the contrary, that a normal man has to look after other people, if it be simply a wife and family. It is that this unit should have an economic basis for its social independence. If he were considering only himself, he might be more independent as a vagabond; he might be more secure as a serf. But the point at the moment is that I like Property because it is a noble thing. I can respect the revolutionist who dislikes it because it is an ignoble thing. But I have no truck with the cynic who likes it because it is ignoble."

G.K. Chesterton in "The New Dark Ages" in G.K.’s Weekly May 21 1927, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 # 8, Issue 73 (July-August 2006) p. 9.

"That old saying – 'You're as happy as your saddest child' - anybody who has been a parent understands that."

Then-U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins quoted by Donna Jacobs in Ottawa Citizen Oct. 3 2005

"He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything."

Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784”
 

"If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978