“Happy the people whose annals are tiresome, happy the people whose annals are vacant.”
Montesquieu, according to Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
“As someone once said, the price of sheltering people from their own folly is to fill the world with fools.”
Link Byfield in British Columbia Report June 10, 1996
“Apathy is a big problem, and it’s getting bigger all the time. To make matters worse, nobody gives a d*mn.”
“Charlie McKenzie, former campaign chairman, Rhinoceros Party, quoted in the Nov. 29th Globe and Mail” according to quoted in Overview Vol. 25, #4 (Winter 2000)
“As to fighting, keep out of it if you can, by all means. When the time comes, if it ever should, that you have to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a challenge to fight, say ‘No’ if you can – only take care you make it clear to yourselves why you say ‘No.’ It’s a proof of the highest courage, if done from true Christian motives. It’s quite right and justifiable, if done from a simple aversion to physical pain and danger. But don’t say ‘No’ because you fear a licking, and say or think it’s because you fear God, for that’s neither Christian nor honest. And if you do fight, fight it out; and don’t give in while you can stand and see.”
Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays
In response to those who ask of the obvious moral advice explained by Christianity, “why cannot you take the truths and leave the doctrines?…. The first answer is simply to say that I am a rationalist. I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“The fast-lane fossil.”
My unkind categorization of a certain type of annoying driver Oct. 10, 2001 (though as with “Today appears to be ‘Drive like a fool day’” it could have happened at any time
“Thomas Aquinas… did, with a most solid and colossal conviction, believe in Life; and in something like what Stevenson called the great theorem of the livableness of life.”
G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox”
“The history of mankind is an immense sea of errors in which a few obscure truths may here and there be found.”
Cesare de Beccaria (a.k.a. Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio), quoted in Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle