“he looked upon us as a sort of animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than by its assistance, to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had not given us; that we …had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions…”

The narrator’s account of his Houyhnhnm master’s judgement on humans, in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels

“Expectations are resentments under construction.”

Anne Lamott, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail July 27, 2001

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”

Stephen King, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail March 28, 2007

“For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live forever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, in Heaven’s Chancery itself…”

Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution

“Now I wish to say I will never call any doll a liar, being at all times a gentleman, and for all I know, Bobby Baker may really think The Brain is handsome and romantic, but personally I figure if she is not lying to him she is at least a little excited when she makes such a statement to The Brain.”

Damon Runyon “The Brain Goes Home” in The Best of Damon Runyon

“When bad things happen, they are never the bad things that were inevitable. You may be quite certain that, if an old pessimist says the country is going to the dogs, it will go to any other animals except the dogs.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 17, 1926, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #6 (April/May 2004)

“From his $1,200 haircuts to his personal war on poverty, proclaimed from the porch of his 28,000-square-foot home, purchased with the proceeds of preposterous lawsuits exploiting infant cerebral palsy, [US Democratic Senator, presidential contender and John Kerry’s 2004 running mate, John] Edwards is living proof that history can play out as tragedy and farce simultaneously.”

Theo Caldwell in National Post December 27, 2007

Academia “is a place filled with generally quite well-meaning people, but on the whole not with brave people, not people who are willing to follow the truth wherever it leads”.

Paul Harper Scott, a music professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, “who resigned in protest at ‘dogmatic’ attitudes to decolonisation which could stop students learning Beethoven and Wagner” quoted in The Telegraph Sept. 18, 2021