“It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the Earth.”

John Steinbeck, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail December 8 2004

“What we learn from history is Churchill’s motto: ‘Never, never, never ever, give in.’”

Allan Fotheringham in Maclean’s June 23, 1997

“The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered into my soul and devoured it.”

Eli Wiesel Night

“one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (re Tom Buchanan who as a star of the Yale football team had been “a national figure in a way”)

“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”

G.K. Chesterton in Where All Roads Lead quoted in Gilbert! magazine January/February 2002

“They should take the fans who threw things on the ice and throw them right out of the building. Without opening the door.”

Announcer on Toronto Maple Leafs’ playoff game April 18, 1996

“Percentage of Americans who say vacationing leaves them tired: 54”
Harper’s Index in Harper’s magazine October 2020

“The common theme of the essays that make up this book is that the proper design of public policies requires a clear and sober understanding of the nature of man and, in particular, of the extent to which that nature can be changed by plan.”

1st sentence of author’s Introduction to James Q. Wilson Thinking About Crime Revised Edition