“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.”
Elliot Carver (the villain) in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies
“Darwin himself, asked about the implications of his theory for religion and morality, replied that while the idea of God was ‘beyond the scope of man’s intellect,’ man’s moral obligations were what they had always been: to ‘do his duty.’ Leslie Stephen, after abandoning the effort to derive an ethic from Darwinism, finally confessed: ‘I now believe in nothing, but I do not the less believe in morality.’ George Eliot uttered the classic statement of this secular ethic when she said that God was ‘inconceivable,’ immortality ‘unbelievable,’ but duty nonetheless ‘peremptory and absolute.’”
Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society
“uncooperation”
What a police officer said he was getting from hostile people during an investigation, on a news program on Channel 16 in Vancouver March 29, 1992.
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
Mahatma Gandhi
"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