“the acknowledged Elizabethan habit of viewing history as a series of object lessons for present conduct.”
Sylvan Barnet’s “Overview” in the 1986 Signet Classic edition of William Shakespeare Julius Caesar
“If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, 'What would I do if I were a horse?'"
"[E]conomist Ely Devons via economist Ronald Coase via economist Hernado de Soto" according to William Watson in National Post December 29, 2001
“The river of human nonsense flows on forever.”
G.K. Chesterton, “A Sermon on Inns,” in The Flying Inn, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #1 (September 2003)
“Laugh, and the world laughs with you;/ Weep, and you weep alone;/ For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,/ But has trouble enough of its own…. There is room in the halls of pleasure/ For a large and lordly train,/ But one by one we must all file on/ Through the narrow aisles of pain.”
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Solitude,” in William Bennett The Book of Virtues [beginning and end of the poem]
Regarding a Bible Ukrainian Christians had secretly copied by hand under Communism, “Would similar risks have been taken and similar loving care have been expended on copying out, say, Magna Carta if for some reason it had become unobtainable? Or the American Declaration of Independence? Or the Communist Manifesto? Or Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Or The Thoughts of Chairman Mao? Or, descending to what Dr Johnson called unresisting imbecility – the recently acclaimed Helsinki Declaration?”
Malcolm Muggeridge in a 1976 speech in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge
“‘What is it that I don’t know?’ Sir Humphrey feigned ignorance. ‘Minister,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what you don’t know. It could be almost anything.’”
A Jim Hacker diary entry in Yes Minister Vol. I
“Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.”
St. Augustine, quoted on title page of John Stewart Collis Living With A Stranger: A Discourse on the Human Body.
“When experience is not retained… infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana, quoted in Leonard Read Let Freedom Reign [I know you all know the 2nd part, but the 1st is also important]