"We confess to little faults only to persuade ourselves that we have no great ones."
François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com
“pessimist: a person who thinks everything is bad except himself.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Flag of the World” in Orthodoxy, quoted in “Chesternitions” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004)
“the present era, by and large since the end of the First World War, has returned to the practice and theory of radical hedonism.... We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.”
Erich Fromm To Have and To Be p. xxvii.
“That's what's important, to feel useful in this old world, to hit a lick against what's wrong, or to say a word for what's right even though you get walloped for saying that word. Now I may sound like a Bible beater yelling up a revival at a river crossing camp meeting, but that don't change the truth none. There's right and there's wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you're dead as a beaver hat.”
Davy Crockett (John Wayne) in The Alamo (according to en.wikiquote.org)
"If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it."
Emerson Pugh, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com
“in the seventeenth century, when men were just what they are now, except that they had no telephones nor airplanes.”
George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
“Unlike the case of Philosophy, where no answer to its question is ever possible, there must be an answer to the great question of Political Economy. How – so it first asked – does mankind produce enough goods for the wants of mankind? That has been answered long ago. How can mankind adjust its production so as not to oversatisfy some, undersatisfy others, and break down in the process? That has not been answered.”
Stephen Leacock "What is Left of Adam Smith?" in On the Front Line of Life
“The sincere controversialist is above all things a good listener.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in an editorial in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008).