“Doing common things so consciously they become spiritual even has a word for it in Japanese, sadou.”
Editorial in Globe & Mail October 6, 1999
“We think of economics as strangled in math because of the formulas and graphs filling most economics textbooks. But you can (and I did) search the entire founding volume of economics, Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, without encountering a mathematical formula. In New Ideas, Buchholz quotes Alfred Marshall, the preeminent economist of the late nineteenth century (and a mathematician): ‘(1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them until you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics.’”
P.J. O’Rourke Eat the Rich
“There is nothing wrong with making mistakes. Just don’t respond with encores.”
“Anonymous”, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail December 26, 2012
“Nearly all the most awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable, from ‘A child is born’ to ‘A soul is damned.’ If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?… Only the mass of men, for instance, have authority to say whether life is good. Whether life is good is an especially mystical and delicate question, and, like all such questions, is asked in words of one syllable. It is also answered in words of one syllable, and Bernard Shaw (as also mankind) answers ‘yes.’”
G.K. Chesterton, “Shaw, The Philosopher,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure: It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
Oscar Wilde quoted in Filip Palda The History of Tobacco Regulation: Forward to the Past
“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