“let them choose rather to be corrected by the wise than to be lauded by the foolish.”
St. Augustine City of God
“An optimist is someone who thinks the future is uncertain.”
Anonymous, quoted as ”Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail March 28, 2000
“Unmaking the bomb (as I’ve written before) is like trying to un-eat the forbidden fruit. Leaving the Tree of Knowledge alone might have been a better choice, but it’s a bit too late for that. Pretending it never happened isn’t a useful idea. God had good reasons for his dietary restrictions in the Garden of Eden, arbitrary as they may have seemed to his critics, then and since.”
George Jonas in National Post August 8, 2015 (defending the use of nuclear weapons to end World War II; interestingly, Jonas was not a believer)
“’Oh, yeah, when I retire from this job I plan on passing the torch, all right. Flaming end first.’”
A harried, sweating office worker in the cartoon Real Life Adventures in Ottawa Sun August 11, 2004
“One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.”
Paul Bourget “(1852-1935) French novelist and critic” quoted as “Thought du Jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail August 6, 2009
“The future is hidden even from the men who make it.”
Anatole France, quoted on https://www.hound-dog-media.com/2014/01/gamblers-fools-and-egotists-59-still_31.html
"The great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered the world is by one man’s pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring him to a sense of it. It is the ordinary and trite sophism of oppression."
Edmund Burke, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things February 2003 (crediting it to a letter from Nino Langiulli of Lynbrook, New York and calling it "an observation of the ever–quotable Edmund Burke with which I was not familiar").
“Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”
Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed (according to https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/194459.Maim_nides)