“It was this century [the last before Christ] that produced most of the famous Romans whose names are familiar to us: the two Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, and finally Augustus, all of whom helped in various ways to save Italy and the Empire from premature dissolution. It was, in fact, an age of great personalities, and one, too, in which personal character became as deeply interesting to the men of the time as it is even now to us.”

W. Warde Fowler, Rome.

"At its core, after all, what is the free market? It’s a mechanism designed to solve a coordination problem, arguably the most important coordination problem: getting resources to the right places at the right cost."

James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds

"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