"Nobody, on their deathbeds, says, 'My biggest regret is eating ice cream.' Life is too short spending it all thinking about how to live longer."

Dr. Steven Bratman, "author of Health Food Junkies/Orthorexia Nervosa: Overcoming the Obsession With Healthful Eating", quoted in Globe & Mail October 16, 2001

"Human history is the history of civilizations. It is impossible to think of the development of humanity in any other terms."

Samuel Huntington The Clash of Civilizations

"As a schoolboy, I would supplement my English lessons by buying and reading The Morning Star, a foreign English-language newspaper that was available in the USSR. The Soviets permitted us to read this Communist daily published in London because, in being very critical of the democratic and capitalist world, the paper parroted the ideological line of the party. For me, however, its effect would prove highly subversive. What left a lasting impression was not the content of the criticism but the very fact that people outside the Soviet Union were free to criticize their own government without going to prison. The stronger the criticism, the more impressed I was by the degree of freedom enjoyed elsewhere."

"Preface" in Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy

"There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little."

Francis Bacon

“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