“but that is the way fear serves us: It always sides with the thing we are afraid of.”
George MacDonald The Princess and the Goblin
“I hate a man who swallows [food], affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters.”
Charles Lamb, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail December 20, 2002
“‘There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.’”
C.S. Lewis, quoted by Douglas Jackson in Gilbert! magazine January-February 2002
“His head, once shaven, was covered with stubble, uniform with his chin, like a clipped yew in a neglected garden.”
Evelyn Waugh Scoop
“When I was 17, I read a quote somewhere that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And when the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
Steve Jobs’ June 122005 commencement address at Stanford University, reprinted in National Post June 30, 2005
“They hate and detest war as a thing manifestly brutal, and yet practised by man more constantly than by any kind of beast.”
Thomas More Utopia
In 1890 Swedish economist Knut Wicksell “argued that if governments ran deficits then citizens were not being clear information about the costs and benefits of programmes which they were being asked to support as voters… If much of the cost could be transferred to a subsequent generation, citizens would select more government expenditure than if they had to carry the true costs of the benefits they received. This commitment to a balanced budget was not as naïve or rigid as some modern commentators like to suggest.”
Roger Douglas Unfinished Business
“Playwright Neil Simon once described one of his characters as so uptight he even had clenched hair.”
Mary Janigan in Maclean’s April 26, 2004