“There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval.”

Santayana, quoted by Jon Winokur, ed. Zen to Go

“I didn’t know of anybody in my entire platoon that wanted to kill, who ever killed before.”

Robert Santos in Al Santoli, ed., Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by 33 American Soldiers Who Fought It

“Strong reciprocators are not altruists.... They’re rejecting lowball offers because the offers violate their individual sense of what a just exchange would be. But the effect is the same as if they loved humanity… Individually irrational acts, in other words, can produce a collectively rational outcome.”

James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds [regarding experiments involving the “ultimatum game”]

“When Benjamin Franklin was seven years old... he fell in love with a whistle. He was so excited about it that he went into the toy shop, piled all his coppers on the counter, and demanded the whistle without even asking its price. ‘I then came home,’ he wrote to a friend 70 years later, ‘and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle.’ When his older brothers and sisters found out that he had paid far more for his whistle than he should have paid, they gave him the horse laugh; and, as he said: ‘I cried with vexation.’... But the lesson taught Franklin was cheap in the end. ‘As I grew up,’ he said, ‘and came into the world and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for the whistle.’”

Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

Willie Nelson, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail February 4, 2008

“The Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God’s command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law.”

Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Somewhere there’s a headlight looking for this deer.”

Laura Peck (on Gilles Duceppe on TV) in National Post May 25, 2004

“an old family friend … a retired auto-shop teacher, the sort of guy who knows about wrenches, who even has views on wrenches.”

Kevin Bolger in Ottawa Citizen March 12, 1999