“It is impossible to insult a man who is not unsure of himself.”

Robert Heinlein quoted in Spider Robinson Time Travelers Strictly Cash

“‘what will always be discovered by a diligent and impartial inquirer, that wherever human nature is to be found, there is a mixture of vice and virtue, a contest of passion and reason…’”

Samuel Johnson quoted in D.J. Enright’s introduction to Samuel Johnson The History of Rasselas

"A recession is very possible. We have been having them for two hundred years. The world hasn’t changed. But nobody has a good record of predicting a recession in advance. There’s an enormous amount of noise in an economic system. You have daily, monthly, weekly ups and downs.”

Milton Friedman in an interview in National Review September 28, 1998

“Eventually Richard [III] comes to understand, if not consciously at first, that he was programming himself as a loser, and has thrown himself into the elegiac role of one who has lost his throne before he has actually lost it.”

Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare

“What is being asked of me is clear. Whether I have the talent and understanding sufficient to accomplish the task is God’s affair.”

A remark attributed to "the young Otto von Bismarck... upon receiving a very delicate diplomatic mission in his early twenties" according to a writer whose name I did not record in Commentary March 1990

“** Fop cit.”

Footnote to the second mention of John Kerry in the Wall St. Journal's “OpinionJournal” August 25, 2005

“‘Oh, Marilla,’ she [Anne] exclaimed one Saturday morning, coming dancing in with her arms full of gorgeous boughs, ‘I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It wouldn’t be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it? Look at these maple branches.’”

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Futurologists (whether utopian or dystopian, and in this instance flapping about the Internet) make “precisely the same mistake that many historians make when writing about the remoter past. And this mistake, it seems to me, is to suppose that to change the material circumstances of life is to alter fundamentally the sense of life itself. But life as it is lived is always pretty much the same, with the same protocols of boredom and excitement, the same glare of midday and gloom of eventide, the same petty ambitions, existential doubts, and immortal longings. We can certainly create the circumstances of greater freedom or greater oppression, but the range of possible variation in life itself, in the simple, irreducible sense of being alive, is far narrower than our chattering classes usually appreciate.”

James Gardner in National Review October 14, 1996