“Travel, in the true sense, has become impossible in the large urban or urbanised district. All such places are alike, plastered with the same advertisements, blocked up with the same big shops, selling the same newspapers, attending the same schools.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Oct. 2, 1926, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 # 3 (Dec. 2001)
“Benevolence is the heart of man, and rightness his road. Sad it is indeed when a man gives up the right road… and allows his heart to stray without enough sense to go after it.”
Mencius in Mencius
“When you do policy, you have to allow for people.”
“David Rose, a research adviser at the Bank of Canada” quoted in Maclean’s October 23, 1995 (both Rose and Maclean's evidently considered it a revolutionary insight in economics).
“There is no limit to the amount of nonsense one can produce if you think too long alone.”
Jacob Viner, quoted by Bernard J. Shapiro, Principal, McGill University, to the Empire Club of Canada, Toronto, May 22, 1997, in Canadian Speeches Vol. XI, #4 (July/August 1997)
“To do great and important tasks, two things are necessary; a plan and not quite enough time.”
“Anonymous”, according to numerous websites.
“this link between art and the sacred stems from the very fibres of man in all civilizations; specialists in prehistorical times confirm this fact for us, and as early as the appearance of cave art…. Still today it is striking to see to what extent artistic impotence is connected to the absence of the sacred.”
Regine Pernoud Those Terrible Middle Ages
“Rome is burning, Mr. Minister. Could we at least hear a sympathetic tune on the fiddle?”
A Financial Post editorial involving a forgotten B.C. minister and a forgotten issue, quoted in British Columbia Report November 10, 1997
“The amusements of mankind, at least of the English part of mankind, teach the same lesson. Our shooting, our hunting, our traveling, our climbing have become laborious pursuits. It is a common saying abroad that ‘an Englishman’s notion of a holiday is a fatiguing journey’…”
Walter Bagehot Physics and Politics [the “lesson” being about our inherited, possibly excessive predisposition to action]