“We certainly are not that class of beings which we vainly think ourselves to be; man, an animal of prey, seems to have rapine and the love of bloodshed implanted in his heart…”

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Letters of an American Farmer

“I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge?”

The heroine in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, quoted by Edward Tingley in First Things January 2002

“Life is too short to be little.”

Disraeli, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“Silence is safer than speech.”

Epictetus, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen Oct. 24, 2002

“If there were no death, there would probably be no religion. As long as there is death, there will be religion – unless our pop psychologists can make us all insane enough to ‘accept death’ calmly and blandly as something natural, as our friend, as ‘a stage of growth’. That’s like telling a quadriplegic that paralysis is a stage of exercise, or a divorcé that divorce is a stage of marriage. It’s the kind of joke only a moron or a sadist would tell.”

Peter Kreeft Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined & Explained

“Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly. Shut up he explained.”

Ring Lardner, The Young Immigrunts quoted by George F. Will in National Post August 24, 2002

“‘Let there be light!’ said God, and there was light! ‘Let there be blood,’ says man, and there’s a sea!’”

Lord Byron “Don Juan” quoted in Orlo Miller The Donnellys Must Die

“in all their actions all men do in fact aim at what they think good.”

Aristotle The Politics