“There is such a thing [as human nature], and it is not entirely tractable. Its most ominous elements are a deep vein of violence, perhaps attendant on a too-great sense of fright; a weakly developed capacity for material satisfaction, perhaps also partly due to that same sense of fright; a tendency to misjudge the difficulties of life as difficulties arising from a specified cause; and a sort of affectional inertia that puts a drag on generosity outside of a small circle of friends and kin.”

Melvin Konner The Tangled Wing: Biological constraints on the human spirit

“the observable phenomenon that trees don’t grow to the sky.”

John Dizard (“Gekko”) in National Review June 2, 1997 on the perils of projecting trends forward

“When the locusts come, they devour everything.”

Bob Uecker and Mickey Herskowitz. Catcher in the Wry

“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.”

“Chinese proverb” quoted in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 9, 2008

“reversing, surely, the order of nature by treating their bodies as means of gratification and their souls as mere encumbrances. It makes no odds, to my mind, whether such men live or die; alive or dead, no one hears of them. The truth is that no man really lives or gets any satisfaction out of life, unless he devotes all his energies to some task and seeks fame by some notable achievement or by the cultivation of some admirable gift.”

Sallust The Conspiracy of Catiline

“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