“This means open war between men, in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or with the sceptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a sceptic par excellence.”
Blaise Pascal Pensées
“He has the strangeness of ten.”
Quoting myself again - I don’t recall when this insult first occurred to me, but it has done so frequently since.
“The object of all human life is play. I for one wish we did not have to fritter away time on frivolous things, like lectures and literature, the time we might have given to serious, solid and constructive work like cutting out cardboard figures and pasting colored tinsel upon them.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Robert Moore-Jumonville in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #5 (March 2000)
“just as historians tell us that Richard I was not fit to fill the shoes of bold Henry II – and that Richard Cromwell was not fit to wear the mantle of his uncle – they might add in future years that Richard Nixon did not measure to the footsteps of Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
John F. Kennedy’s nomination acceptance speech July 16, 1960 (the irony being that the metaphor only works if we have some idea who these people were, yet JFK didn’t realize Richard “Tumble-Down Dick” Cromwell was not Oliver’s nephew but his son, or that Oliver Cromwell’s “mantle” is not something you would want to have fit you).
“Certainly the point that liberty is only one argument in the utility function, and you can put liberty on an indifference curve against bananas and have an isoproduct curve and indifference curves and this and that, is part of this moral colour-blindness.”
Walter Block in Michael A. Walker, ed., Freedom Democracy and Economic Welfare: Proceedings of an International Symposium
“Depend on it that if a man talks of his misfortunes, there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery, there never is any recourse to the mention of it.”
Samuel Johnson, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail January 31, 2003
“There’s no elevator to the major leagues. You have to take the stairs.”
The supervisor of Canadian scouting for Major League Baseball, Tom Valcke, quoted in Maclean’s November 11, 1992
“We cannot begin by forming independently a theory of how God is knowable and then seek to test it out or indeed to actualize it and fill it with material content. How God can be known must be determined from first to last by the way in which He actually is known.”
Thomas Torrance, quoted in John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist