“To shorten the winter, borrow some money due in the spring.”

W.J. Vogel quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail December 16, 2003 [but I think Benjamin Franklin got there first with “Those have a short Lent who owe money to be paid at Easter.”]

“The problem with introspection is that it has no end; like Bottom’s dream in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it has no bottom.”

Philip K. Dick The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

“You can be quick but not in a hurry.”

John Wooten, quoted on ESPN January 28, 1989

“If all decorum, discipline, and subordination are to be destroyed, and universal Pyrrhonism, anarchy, and insecurity of property are to be introduced, nations will soon wish their books in ashes, seek for darkness and ignorance, superstition and fanaticism, as blessings, and follow the standard of the first mad despot, who, with the enthusiasm of another Mahomet, will endeavor to obtain them.”

John Adams, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind

“In opposition to his enervated gang of outcast wrecks you are able to marshal the flower and strength of all Italy.”

Cicero Selected Political Speeches [referring on the one hand to Catalina and on the other to the people of Rome]

“You understand that you’re a short-term phenomenon, like the mosquitoes that come in the spring and the fall. You get a perspective on yourself. You’re getting back to the fundamentals of the planet. Neil feels that way, because we’ve talked about it.”

A friend on why first-man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrong loves his farm, quoted in Ottawa Citizen July 16, 1999

“As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forest and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries…. Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails.”

Michael Oakeshott “The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind” in Rationalism in politics and other essays

“As a profession, we have made a mess of things. It seems to me that this failure of economics to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with our general propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences, an attempt which in our field may lead to serious error…. If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire that full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.”

Friedrich Hayek in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Economics, quoted in Brian Lee Crowley The Road to Equity