“The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.”

William Faulkner, quoted by Florence King in National Review April 19, 1999

“The instinct of the human soul perceives that the fool may be permitted to praise himself, but that the wise man ought to praise God.”

G.K. Chesterton “The True Vanity of Vanities” in The Apostle and the Wild Ducks, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 “Nos. 1 & 2” Sept.-Oct. 2007

“If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary."

Jim Rohn, quoted by Jeff Hayden on Inc. online (www.inc.com/jeff-haden/top-350-inspiring-motivational-quotes-to-tweet-and-share.html)

“I am a hard-shelled materialist myself, I suppose. But I was reminded of Chesterton last week by a report of a conversation between one of the would-be Islamikaze bombers, Muktar Said-Ibrahim, and a former neighbour of his in Stanmore, the suburb of north London where he grew up. ‘He asked me,’ Sarah Scott recalled, ‘if I was Catholic because I have Irish family, and I said I didn't believe in anything, and he said I should. He told me he was going to have all these virgins when he got to Heaven if he praises Allah. He said if you pray to Allah and if you have been loyal to Allah you would get 80 virgins, or something like that.’ Now it is the easiest thing in the world to make fun of the notion, apparently a commonplace among jihadists, that a suicide bomber who successfully blows up a decent number of infidels is rewarded in heaven with 80 virgins. (I personally can think of nothing more terrifying than 80 virgins; I can just picture the belles of St Trinian's running amok.) But is it, I wonder, significantly stranger to believe, like Sarah Scott, in nothing at all?”

Niall Ferguson in the Telegraph July 31, 2005

“I grant you that my children need their meals balanced…. My own feeling, however, is that they need something else even more. They need to have their tastes unbalanced: to have them skewed, driven off dead center, and fastened firmly on the astonishing oddness of the world.”

Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb

“We are as Hector on the walls of Troy with Andromache and always have been. Only the Crystal Palace and all those nineteenth-century trust funds ever assured us otherwise.”

An author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine October 1991

“The improvements in transportation do not cut down travelling time but merely increase the area over which people have to travel."

Bertrand Russell, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail December 12, 2003

“It is a good thing to suffer fools gladly; and an even better thing to enjoy fools uproariously.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News October 9, 1920, quoted in “Chesterton Rewrites more of the Classic Lines” in Gilbert Magazine July-August 2007