“the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.”

“Eric Temple Bell, the mathematician” quoted in National Review June 7, 1993

“Fun and happiness are not synonymous. Happy people don’t need fun. Fun takes your mind off things.”

P.J. O’Rourke The Bachelor Home Companion

“sailors pressed into the service… whose skills and fidelity were equally suspicious.”

Edward Gibbon Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

“At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise or wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.”

G.K. Chesterton, quoted by David W. Fagerberg in First Things March 2000

“The past is irrevocable, but many of the factors behind its tragedies are still at work in the present, and are a danger to the future. The issues change – eugenics is not environmentalism – but the dogmatism and the ego behind the dogmatism are the same.”

Thomas Sowell Is Reality Optional?

“The spectacle of economists bringing their awesome mathematical and statistical techniques to bear on the analysis of irrelevant or misleading data can only disgust those for whom the desire to understand reality take precedence over the desire to impress their colleagues with analytic pyrotechnics.”

Robert Higgs Crisis and Leviathan

“King James [VI of Scotland/I of England] was a man, the Venetian ambassador remarked, ‘with a wonderful capacity for doing himself harm.’”

Catherine Drinker Bowen The Lion and the Throne

“One can’t always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.”

The narrator re his humble lifestyle as a playwright (before the adventure begins) in H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon