"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say, and then don't say it."
Sam Levenson, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail August 25, 2010
"the mortadella of philosophers. Little globules of rich, fatty thinking, in vast quantities of baloney."
P.J. O'Rourke on Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted by Noah Richler in National Post December 6, 2001
"Every right is a divine right."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News December 20, 1924 quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. VIII #7 (June 2005)
"Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don’t."
E-mailed by a friend without attribution
"What happens in your house is more important than what happens in the White House."
Barbara Bush, quoted in Charles C. Heath The Blessings of Liberty
"for better and for worse, we do not erase. Only ideological dictatorships erase."
John Ralston Saul in the inaugural LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture, reprinted in Globe & Mail March 24, 2000
"the study of man in the ordinary business of life".
Alfred Marshall's definition of economics, cited in Marshall Jevons Murder at the Margin
"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."
Often attributed to Immanuel Kant but appears to be from Will Durant, part of Durant's effort to explain Kant's thought (whatever the merits of his analysis, Kant's often impenetrable prose style did not lend itself to bon mots)