"There is no significance to the sound and fury of his [man’s] life, as of a stage tragedy, unless something is being affirmed by the complete action."

Richard Weaver Ideas Have Consequences p. 20.

In the modern view "With the Enlightenment… World history was finally brought to its climax, its real new beginning, not in Jerusalem but in Western Europe and America, not in the first century but in the eighteenth. (We may perhaps be allowed a wry smile at the way in which post-Enlightenment thinkers to this day heap scorn upon the apparently ridiculous idea that world history reached its climax in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, while themselves holding a view we already know to be at least equally ridiculous.)"

N.T. Wright The Challenge of Jesus

"Never take a trend out a window."

His longtime friend and advisor on statistics in social science William Fielding Ogburn, quoted by Robert Ardrey in The Territorial Imperative

"A good leader never walks by a mistake."

An “oft-repeated maxim” of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, according to Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, Stormin’ Norman

"I am put in mind of a little book, titled Manners, that my own grandmother gave me as a child…. printed in 1912…. which I have sadly misplaced… good for a laugh when I was a teenager…. It was a noble little book, as I came to see later…. Implicit within every statement in the book was a conception of civilization, an aspiration to raise ourselves up. Not simply to ‘get ahead,’ but to rise out of the slovenly condition of being barbaric."

David Warren in Ottawa Citizen April 9, 2002 [reflecting on Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother]

"They are good people in the worst sense of the word."

Mark Twain on the religious right of his day, quoted by Jay Nordlinger in National Review April 19, 1999 [actually quoting Garrison Keillor quoting Twain].

"Veni, Vidi, Visa: I came, I saw, I shopped."

"Top 20 Internet Tag Lines" in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #8 (July/August 2001)

"it is the only true object of existence to mean something"

G.K. Chesterton, "The Heraldic Lion," in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton