“Milton Friedman: … There’s a phrase written on the entrance to one of the social sciences buildings at the University of Chicago, which is the statement … Rose Friedman: If you can’t measure it, measure it anyway. Milton Friedman: Actually, it was: ‘When you cannot measure something, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfying.’”
An Economic Freedom of the World network meeting in 2001, quoted in Fraser Forum May 2002.
“Standing on the [Atlantic City in the early 1990s] Boardwalk this mild October day, one beheld the Trump Taj Mahal with that odd mixture of fascination and nausea reserved for the great blunders of human endeavor.”
James Howard Kunstler The Geography of Nowhere
“Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step. De Maistre says that ‘to know HOW TO WAIT is the great secret of success.’”
Samuel Smiles Self-Help
“The catch-22 of the aesthete is that he lives for a new experience, but all experiences are old as soon as they pass....Wilde wrote, ‘I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all’...”
Joseph Pearce in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #7
“It is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by David W. Fagerberg in First Things March 2000
“it is the nature of man not to have a nature.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Mortimer Adler Ten Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in Modern Thought (Adler does not agree with Merleau-Ponty, but thinks the idea well worth pondering)
“In truth, the problems facing France are difficult, but not profound.”
News story in Globe & Mail May 7, 2007
“‘it may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.”
“Wisdom from Granny and Gramps” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004)