“I will bloom wherever I am planted.”

MP Diane Ablonczy quoted in National Post July 10, 2000 [specifically to do with internal Canadian Alliance matters but a maxim of far broader relevance]

“‘France may be a predominantly Roman Catholic country, but it is also officially secular, with separation of church and state one of its most sacred tenets.’ – New York Times, April 8”

The Wall St. Journal's OpinionJournal April 8, 2005 [under the very appropriate headline “If It’s Sacred, Doesn’t It Violate Itself?”]

“Is Britney Spears the next Madonna? I surely hope not. One of either is a surplus.”

Rex Murphy in Globe & Mail Nov. 10, 2001

“We must have a holiday from habits, instead of merely a habit of taking holidays.”

G.K. Chesterton in London Magazine August 1924, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 16 #3 (Nov.-Dec. 2012)

“We must take human nature as we find it. Perfection falls not to the share of mortals.”

George Washington to John Jay August 8, 1786, in W.B. Allen Washington, George. A Collection.

“Most people most of the time find it impossible to argue for any sustained period against their own manifest best interests.”

William C. Mitchell and Randy T. Simmons Beyond Politics: Markets, Welfare, and the Failure of Bureaucracy

“The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings – crowded, active, thick... But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow’s horizons are vague and its demands are few.”

Larry McMurtry quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail April 5, 2004

“Silence is all the genius a fool has, and it is one of the things that a smart man knows how to use when he needs it.”

“Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist, writer, 1939” quoted in something called the Freedom Forum calendar for Nov. 1, 2000.