“The expression [“the Show Me State”] was coined as an insult by outsiders and was meant to suggest that Missourians were so stupid that they had to be shown how to do everything. The state’s inhabitants, however, contrarily took it as a compliment, persuading themselves that it implied a certain shrewd caution on their part.”
Bill Bryson Made in America
“Well, that is one of the things to find out sometime [why the local roads are red]. Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive – it’s such an interesting world. it wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?”
Anne in Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
“The pain in my soul is unbearable. I keep asking myself the same unsolvable question: If my assault rifle took people’s lives, it means that I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, ... son of a farmer and Orthodox Christian am responsible for people’s deaths. The longer I live, the more often that question gets into my brain, the deeper I go in my thoughts and guesses about why the Almighty allowed humans to have devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression. Everything changes, only a man and his thinking remain unchanged: he’s just as greedy, evil, heartless and restless as before!”
Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47 assault rifle in “a regretful letter” to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, shortly before his death at age 94, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen Jan. 14, 2014 (apparently a spokesman for the Patriarch replied “If the weapon is used to defend the Motherland, the Church supports both its creators and the servicemen using it.”)
“perhaps an inelegant analysis of a central problem would be more valuable than a rigorous analysis of a peripheral issue.”
The “noted economic historian ” Robert Higgs quoted in Thomas Sowell Conquests and Cultures
“Few men get killed. Most of those who meet sudden ends get themselves killed.”
The narrator in “The Whosis Kid” in Dashiell Hammett The Continental Op
“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