“We need metaphors of magic and monsters in order to understand the human condition.”

Stephen Donaldson, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 25, 2007 [to which I add “Yes, but why?”]

“Another reason is the inverse relation between size and irritability. Among dogs, the yappers are always Yorkies, the things that fit in purses and make you think of calling pest control.”

Richard Brookheiser in National Review June 26, 1995 (his specific topic is why people are nicer in lower-class than upscale yuppie gyms)

“Leisure is a food, like sleep; liberty is a food, like sleep. Leisure is a matter of quality rather than quantity. Five minutes lasts longer when one cannot be disturbed than five hours when one maybe disturbed.”

G.K. Chesterton “On Holidays”, from New Witness May 21, 1914 in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #7 (June 2008)

“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