“the atmosphere of alarm, of being scotched, of being up a tree of incredible height...”

Arnold Bennett in "Lo! ‘Twas a Gala Night!" in Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

“That’s true enough, but we must go and work in the garden.”

Candide (when reminded by Pangloss that all is for the best) in Voltaire Candide

“Without memory we are a society suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s, tackling each day like a baby with its finger stuck out before the flames…. our self-imposed Alzheimer’s.”

John Ralston Saul in the inaugural LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture, reprinted in Globe & Mail March 24, 2000

"Liberty underlies the entire enterprise; it’s not just one more vector in an indifference curve.”

Walter Block in Michael Walker, ed., Freedom Democracy and Economic Welfare: Proceedings of an International Symposium

"In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that He did not also limit his stupidity."

Konrad Adenauer, quoted at www.brainyquote.com/quotes/konrad_adenauer_121389

"'People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.' – Charles K. Kettering (1876-1958) American Engineer, Inventor"

www.yuni.com/quotes/kettering.html

“we have lost a vision of man. We are not sure how different he actually is from animal or vegetable or rock or mineral. It is partly, I think, because we have ceased trying to relate ourselves to God: we no longer even cry that God is dead; instead, we have named him an hypothesis, a dream, and turned him over to the laboratory to ‘prove.’ And because we have stopped searching for God we have stopped searching for ultimate meaning, saying there is no purpose in human existence. Hence all is absurdity, all is nothing. The more honest among those who want God ‘proved’ tend to seek uneasy solace in neo-nihilism; or, putting heart above logic, in humanism - while the less honest settle for their own brand of idol worship, sacrificing all to success or skin color or capitalism or communism or their work or their pleasure, whispering, Let’s don’t think about it.”

Lillian Smith Killers of the Dream

“Reading this column was like eating a chocolate-covered lemon: sweet on the outside, but terribly bitter when you bite down.”

Letter from Jill Woodley of Ottawa in Ottawa Citizen November 14, 2004 [not about one of my columns]