“the immortal phrase ‘a comprehensive background of ignorance,’ a condition I suppose I exemplified at the time.”
This quotation comes from somebody named Zimmerman and the quoted phrase is from George Edison, his tutor at Trinity College, University of Toronto; alas my note to myself on its origin is otherwise incomplete.
“Is the normal human need, the normal human condition, higher or lower than those special states of the soul which call out a doubtful and dangerous glory? Those special powers of knowledge or sacrifice which are made possible only by the existence of evil? Which should come first to our affections, the enduring sanities of peace or the half-maniacal virtues of battle? Which should come first, the man great in the daily round or the man great in emergency? Which should come first, to return to the enigma before me, the grocer or the chemist”
Adam Wayne in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“The terms of their mutual concessions were these: that Caesar should desert Cicero, Lepidus his brother Paulus, and Anthony, Lucius Caesar, his uncle by his mother’s side. Thus they let their anger and fury take from them the sense of humanity, and demonstrated that no beast is more savage than man when possessed with power answerable to his rage.”
Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus Plutarch’s Lives II
“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