“Watching [Nick] Faldo and [Curtis] Strange is like watching two glaciers at work.”

TV announcer re the Ryder Cup on Sunday July 24, 1995, 17th hole

“‘The idea that going to the beach was good for you was a creation of 18th-century Britain,’ writes Charles Leadbeater in Prospect magazine. ‘Entrepreneurs keen to promote an alternative to the spa hit upon the idea that immersing people in cold salty water might be healthy. One of the first recorded bathing expeditions took to the North Sea at Scarborough in 1627. A century later, a string of seaside alternatives to the spas at Bath and Buxton were well established. Before that, beaches had been regarded as hostile places, at best a working space for people who made their living from the sea: fishermen, smugglers, wreckers. Swimming for pleasure, and sunbathing, were unheard of.’”

“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail September 15, 2004

“I argue for a sober view of man and his institutions that would permit reasonable things to be accomplished, foolish things abandoned, and utopian things forgotten. A sober view of man requires a modest definition of progress.”

James Q. Wilson Thinking About Crime

“The criminologist and sociologists are right, then, when they tell us that man is a ‘cooperating animal.’ But what they rarely realize is that cooperation only works if someone is willing to punish infractions. It must be done as a purely neutral phenomenon, with the punishment fitting the crime, not the criminal. Ideally, every individual should carry with him the remorseless sense that somewhere someone cares whether they break the law.”

William Tucker Vigilante: The Backlash Against Crime in America

“Leola had just joined the great company of the walking wounded in the battle of life.”

Robertson Davies Fifth Business

“I knew a wise man that had it for a by-word, when he saw men hasten to a conclusion, Stay a little, that we may make an end the sooner.”

Francis Bacon, Bacon’s Essays (edited with Introduction and Notes by F.G. Selby)

“For parents who would take a scorched-earth approach to religion...”

Janet Scott Barlow in Chronicles magazine September 1991

“One can always tell when one is getting old and serious by the way that holidays seem to interfere with one’s work.”

“Bob Edwards in the Calgary Eye Opener, 1913” quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail August 5, 2002