“If you’re in a dark and terrible place, and someone says, ‘You’re okay the way you are,’ you don’t know what to do about that. ‘No, I’m not. I’m having a terrible time. And I’m hopeless.’ Well, then what? That’s it? What do you want to tell a young person? ‘You’re 17. You’re okay the way you are.’ No, you’re not. You’ve got 60 years to be better. You could be incomparably better across multiple dimensions. And in pursuing that better, that’s where you’ll find the meaning in your life. And that will give you the antidote to the suffering.”

Jordan Peterson on Instagram March 29, 2022 [https://www.instagram.com/p/CbQwpO6Mekq/]

The world “continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords.”

Lord Birkenhead (F.E. Smith) in 1923 according to a writer whose name I did not record, if the piece was signed, in National Review November 15, 1993

“Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the Unknowable. But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”

H.L. Mencken, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail April 6, 2009

“As the historian Forrest McDonald pointed out, Filmer never persuaded anyone by eloquence or logic, since he possessed neither.”

Richard Brookheiser in National Review February 22, 1999 [Filmer being the 17th-century English Tory essayist Robert Filmer, the target of John Locke’s now mostly unread First Treatise of Government, which is now mostly unread in significant measure because it demolished Filmer so completely that nobody now remembers him]

“As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”

James Madison, quoted by Christopher Buckley in National Review November 22, 1999

“He [Arnold Toynbee] observes that one of the consistent symptoms of disintegration is that the elites – Toynbee’s ‘dominant minority’ – begin to imitate those at the bottom of society.”

Charles Murray in Wall Street Journal February 6 2001

“Economics, for instance, is a collection of occasionally useful truisms. As prophets of the future, economists are about equal to witch doctors.”

Val Sears in Ottawa Sun November 3, 1999 [I do not agree, at least about sound economists, but sometimes I quote something because I consider it an instructive error, including for being widely but wrongly believed]

Re a lot of the kids in Haight-Ashbury already by summer 1967 “They’re like zombies, people with deadened nervous systems, people who see themselves as skeletons festooned with flesh.... The result is a young person who has barbed-wire guts, to use a phrase suggested by [Erik] Erikson.”

Nicholas von Hoffman, We are the people our parents warned us against