“On limited lines I was making progress, but the wings of imagination still drooped nervelessly at my sides.”

Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands

“Her choice [that of the mother/title character in the novel Sophie's Choice] is plainly evil; for the sake of a better result, she has united herself with the sin of the murderer. And in the end the other child dies too. But how could she choose otherwise, if she had no faith in God?”

J. Budziszewski What We Can’t Not Know

“Better late than early”

From a list of maxims submitted by a Grade 3 Calgary Montessori School class, in Globe & Mail November 29, 2001

“Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.”

Max Beerbohm quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #5 (March 2006)

“the Roman empire is afflicted rather than changed – a thing which has befallen it in other times also, before the name of Christ was heard, and it has been restored after such affliction – a thing which even in these times is not to be despaired of.”

Augustine City of God

“Economic systems come and go like fashions in surgery and in the clothes of women, and during the nineteenth century the Mercantile System was discarded in favour of a system of free and open competition. At least, so I have been told.”

Hendrick Van Loon The Story of Mankind

“people often ask me, well don’t you have faith in anything? And I always have the same answer, I do have one unshakable [faith], and that is I have an unshakable [faith] in the unreliability of man. I know that no matter what we do, some damn fool will make a mess of it.”

Garrett Hardin, quoted in Julian Simon Hoodwinking the Nation

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

John Milton, quoted in the introduction to the fence-whitewashing excerpt from Mark Twain Tom Sawyer in William Bennett The Book of Virtues