"the present occupies almost the whole field of vision. Beyond it, isolated from it, and quite unimportant, is something called 'the old days’ – a small, comic jungle in which highwaymen, Queen Elizabeth, knights-in-armor, etc. wander about. Then (strangest of all) beyond the old days comes a picture of ‘primitive man.’ He is ‘science,’ not ‘history,’ and is therefore felt to be much more real than the old days. In other words, the prehistoric is much more believed in than the historic.”

C.S. Lewis, The Grand Miracle, describing the attitude of "the uneducated Englishman" of his day.

"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the FORTUNE OF OTHERS, and render THEIR HAPPINESS necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it."

Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, quoted by Preston Manning in Fraser Forum July 2001 [a reprint of his address to the Fraser Institute Annual General Meeting].

'Every man must wear out at least one pair of fools’ shoes."

Charlie Chan, according to a biography of Chan's creator Earl Derr Biggers I found on an AOL group on October 26, 2006

"The late Jimmy 'Schnozzle’ Durante memorably exposed the flaw in this logic: 'They said that Hitler was mad. They said that Napoleon was mad. They said that Louie was mad.' Interjection: 'Who’s Louie?' Durante: 'My uncle. He was mad.'"

Editorial in National Post December 27, 1999

"Are you tired of always getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop?"

The plug for some show on YTV in January 1996 [that's all I recorded of the source]

"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."

Sydney Harris, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail August 5, 2009

"Our magazine’s habit of pointing this out [that the elite’s myths about Canada are not actually true], and of stubbornly remembering times when things made more sense, causes our critics to say we’re stuck in the past. I can only reply that they are stuck in the present – in most respects a singularly dismal and confining place to be. It’s like having cultural Alzheimer’s."

Link Byfield in Globe & Mail October 25, 1999

"Nobody has a right to conduct a trade of which he is ashamed."

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 2, 1936, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #6 (April/May 2004)