“Someone once defined a great man as one who never reminds us of someone else.”

A narrator whose name I did not record in a segment on Dick Butkus in a film on NFL greats broadcast on Channel 3 in Ottawa on August 22, 1995

“the great religions teach salvation as an individual matter. There are no group discounts in the ten commandments, Christ was not a committee, and Allah does not welcome believers into paradise saying, 'you weren’t much good yourself, but you were standing near some good people.'"

P.J. O'Rourke, quoted by Stephen Harper in The Report June 2003

“I sense owls in the swamp. Jag anar ugglor i mossen."

An expression meaning one has a feeling that something is wrong, one of a set of “Idioms from Sweden” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2005)

"Most acts of assent require far more courage than most acts of protest, since courage is clearly a readiness to risk self-humiliation."

Nigel Dennis, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail Jan. 19, 2006

"The history of the earth! Doth it present anything but crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other?"

J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. Letters from an American Farmer [prompted by American slavery].

"Dissidents understood the power of freedom because it had already transformed our own lives. It liberated us the day we stopped living in a world where ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ were, like everything else, the property of the State. And for the most part, this liberation did not stop when we were sentenced to prison."

Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy

"The most important sort of knowledge is to know which things are worth knowing."

G.K. Chesterton in Sign April 1932, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 17 #2-3 (Nov.-Dec. .2013)

“Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.”

D.P. Diffiné, “Wal-Mart Open for Business: A 30th Anniversary Salute to Wal-Mart” (1992)