"Clear? Huh! Why a four-year-old child could understand this report! Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can't make head or tail of it."

Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) in Duck Soup (this line is widely quoted including online but usually inaccurately, including the child being 5)

"a mind, as H.G. Wells observed of the President [Franklin Roosevelt], 'appallingly open,' open indeed at both ends, through which all sorts of half-baked ideas flow…"

John T. Flynn, Country Squire in the White House, excerpted in S.I. Hayakawa Language in Thought and Action

"To the materialist things like nations, classes, civilizations must be more important than individuals, because the individuals live only seventy-odd years each and the group may last for centuries. But to the Christian, individuals are more important, for they live eternally; and races, civilizations and the like, are in comparison the creatures of a day."

C.S. Lewis “Man or Rabbit?” in The Grand Miracle

"What President Bush will need is an agenda that catches fire without blowing up."

National Review Dec. 18, 2000 [if the comment had a specified author I failed to write it down]

"The habit of contemplation, the ability to sit down in front of something and care enough to let it speak for itself, cannot be acquired soon enough."

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb p. xiii.

"Whether, in the great transfer of estates, injustice had or had not been committed, was immaterial. That transfer, just or unjust, had taken place so long ago, that to reverse it would be to unfix the foundations of society. There must be a time of limitation to all rights. After thirty-five years of actual possession, and after twenty-five years of possession solemnly guaranteed by statute, after innumerable leases and releases, mortgages and devises, it was too late to search for flaws in titles."

Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England (regarding Ireland, and arguing that James II could have put the issue to rest by confirming current owners in their title while taxing them heavily enough to pay decent compensation to the dispossessed)

 "A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbours."

Andrei Sakharov, quoted in Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy

"Think. Think hard."

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News July 6, 1912 quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #3 (Dec. 2006)