“To question a wise man is the beginning of wisdom.”

“German proverb” e-mailed to me without attribution

“Winston had 10 ideas every day, only one of which was good, and he did not know which it was."

General Sir Alan Brooke, Winston Churchill’s chief of staff, quoted by John Keegan in National Post August 29, 2002

"If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man."

G.K. Chesterton in “The Empire of the Insect” in What’s Wrong with the World, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 12 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2009).

“Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don’t have film.”

Emailed by a friend without citation.

 “She stopped. It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.”

The internal monologue of the heroine, Mma Precious Ramotswe, in Alexander McCall Smith The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

“The study of history brings to youth the experience that is lacking to it; it can help the adolescent to overcome his most usual temptation: to be exclusive, to condemn in advance some particular tendency, person, or group; to have a vision of the universe limited only to his own vision (and if only this were a matter merely of adolescents!). At the age when it is important to confront the values received – those of his surroundings, childhood, family, or social milieu – with his own personality, the study of history would enlarge the field of this investigation… By familiarizing oneself with other times, other eras, other civilizations, one acquires the habit of distrusting criteria of one’s own time…”

Régine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle AgesPernoud TMA p. 170.

“What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, then problem which remains is purely one of logic.... This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces.”

Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, 35 (January 1945)

"The smarter you are, the smaller your strike zone."

"Anonymous" quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail November 4, 2010