“We must take the passions of men as nature has given them…”

George Washington in W.B. Allen George Washington: A Collection.

“In their political arrangements, men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time. With regard to futurity, we are to treat it like a ward. We are not so to attempt an improvement of his fortune as to put the capital of his estate at risk.”

Edmund Burke An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs

“Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually opposites. The selfish person does not love himself too much but too little; in fact he hates himself. This lack of fondness and care for himself, which is only one expression of his lack of productiveness, leaves him empty and frustrated. He is necessarily unhappy and anxiously concerned to snatch from life the satisfactions which he blocks himself from attaining. He seems to care too much for himself but actually he only makes an unsuccessful attempt to cover up and compensate for his failure to care for his real self…. It is true that selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.”

Erich Fromm Man for Himself

“it is not probable that a man who is careless in small matters is careful in large ones; quite the contrary, a man who cannot even copy a sentence of Keynes’s correctly is not likely to be a reliable reporter of complicated or badly expressed ideas.”

George Stigler "On Scientific Writing” in The Intellectual and the Market Place and Other Essays [in support of a proposal that someone undertake a large-scale random verification of statements of empirical fact and of quotations from other writers in published economic articles]

“To die for one's country means to live forever”.

A letter from Marko Milosevic about his father Slobodan, who did not have a priest at his interment because he was an atheist, quoted with appropriate critique in OpinionJournal March 20, 2006

“He shall die a flea’s death.”

William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

“Tourism was the source of history’s original failure of cultural understanding. Cyril Aldred writes that ancient Greek and Roman vacationers in Egypt ‘never really understood Egyptian religion and were inclined to see in inexplicable acts and beliefs a more profound significance than actually existed.’ Thus the concept of the ‘inscrutable Orient,’ the idea of the ‘mysterious East.’”

P.J. O’Rourke in The Atlantic Monthly September 2002

“Political conflict, domestic or international, is rooted in the nature of man. It is a reflection of his finitude, his moral weakness, and his irrationality.”

Ernest W. Lefever Ethics and United States Foreign Policy