“In his new memoirs, Decision Points, George W. Bush...  tells of one summer job on a cattle ranch in which the foreman derided those who were ‘Book smart, sidewalk stupid.’"

William Watson in Ottawa Citizen December 7, 2010

"Perhaps, like me, the reader is sufficiently antique to recall a time when genius was normally reserved for that rare soul who, in Dr. Johnson’s phrase, ‘can do readily what no one else can do at all’..."

A writer whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine Jan. 1988

"There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man."

G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004)

"it’s not as though I just fell off a turnip truck."

NBA great Bill Russell explaining that although he had not coached in 10 years he had not lost touch with the game because of various basketball-related activities; I did not record when or where I heard him say it

"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