“If they’ll do it with you, they’ll do it to you.”
A rule attributed to “Dr. Phil” in a letter from Shannon Bunkowsky of Winnipeg in Maclean’s Oct. 23, 2006
“Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.”
George Sand, quoted on https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/george_sand_390195
“Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.”
G. K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“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