“Pericles said, twenty-four centuries ago: ‘Come, gentlemen, we sit too long on trifles.’ We do, indeed!”

Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“a lion can spot a limp.”

Quoted in an email from a reader this fall, on the subject of foreign policy but sourced to “something I heard an ex-convict say about the danger of exhibiting weakness in prison.”

“I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves.”

Bobby Fischer, quoted on Agadmator's YouTube channel.

“It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.”

John Stuart Mill, quoted without further attribution in the Epoch Times email newsletter Oct. 1, 2020 (it is in fact from On Liberty)

“He was rude and unhygienic.”

“The robot head in Lexx: The Dark Zone Stories Jan. 1, 1999” [It’s the source I recorded and I’m sticking to it although I can offer no justification for ever having watched an episode (or even knowing the show existed, which in fact I’d forgotten) except that as summaries of someone’s undesirability go this line is excellent. Google confirms that the show existed and lasted four seasons (!) and says the robot head’s name was 790 and who am I to argue?]

“Happy the man, and happy he alone,/ He, who can call today his own:/ He who, secure within, can say: ‘Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have liv’d today.’”

The Roman poet Horace, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.”

Edmund Burke on French Revolutionaries, quoted in Robert Bork The Tempting of America (and also though slightly less completely in William D. Gairdner Constitutional Crack-Up)

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life, which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run.”

Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living