“Who is the most read historian of the ancient world? the learned professor asks his class. Tacitus perhaps? Suetonius? Herodotus? All wrong, he’s afraid. The most read and probably most reliable recorder of ancient history was a man known as Luke, the probable author of the Third Gospel of the New Testament and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles.”

Christian History Project, The Veil is Torn

“‘The prejudices of some political writers against shopkeepers and tradesmen, are altogether without foundation. So far is it from being necessary, either to tax them, or to restrict their numbers, that they can never be multiplied so as to hurt the public, though they may so as to hurt one another.’”

Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, quoted in H.B. Action The Morals of Markets and Related Essays.

"Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are your fears."

Rudyard Kipling, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com

"A pessimist is a person who has not had enough experience to be a cynic."

Mary Pettibone Poole, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Globe & Mail July 27, 2001

“family: the thing on which all civilization is built; the idea that a man and a woman should live largely for the next generation and that they should, to some extent, defer their personal amusements, such as divorce and dissipation, for the benefit of the next generation.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 22, 1911, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #5 (March 2003)

“We generally found him loaded with work to do.”

Ralph C. Maddocks (insincere letter of recommendation line about the office drunk)

“Kind of a shame kids have to grow up into people.”

Davy Crockett (played by John Wayne) in The Alamo

"Montesquieu seems, in fact, to have looked on the nature of man as entirely plastic, as passively reproducing the impressions, and submitting implicitly to the impulses, which it receives from without. And here no doubt lies the error which vitiates his system as a system. He greatly underrates the stability of human nature.... those qualities which each generation receives from its predecessors, and transmits but slightly altered to the generation which follows it."

Henry Sumner Maine Ancient Law (re L’Esprit des Lois)