“If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.”
La Rochefoucauld, quoted in Globe & Mail October 18, 1999
“People tell me they get depressed reading about the Middle East. Well, I get depressed writing about it. There’s supposed to be progress in human history, but the Middle East is moving backward.”
Leonard Stern in Ottawa Citizen January 17, 2009
“Of other Nobel Prize winners who make many grandiloquent statements on things they know nothing about, Stigler said that they ‘issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis.’”
Thomas Sowell Is Reality Optional?
“[T]he absorption of the man and the exclusion of other matters show not how dull the subject is, but how fascinating it is. Because a man refuses to come out of Eden, they assume that he is being detained in gaol.”
G.K. Chesterton on absorption in apparently trivial hobbies, in “A Defence of Bores,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.”
Confucius, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go
“The intolerant myth may come from the fact that ‘tolerance’ is a vague term that is largely undefined. It does tend to elicit an emotional response. Tolerance is a good thing and is meant to serve justice. So if someone disagrees with me on an essential matter of the faith, I have to be very tolerant of the person, accepting and open to them, but that does not mean I should accept their ideas in a kind of moral relativism.”
“Rev. Eric Nicolai, with the communications office of Opus Dei in Montreal” asked in an e-mail conversation about the organization’s sinister image, in Ottawa Citizen October 7, 2002
“Presumably an Appalachian pin-up would be a moonshine girl.”
One of mine from January 5, 2000 – I don’t know if certain newspapers still have “Sunshine girls” but they did then.
“There’s a French expression that translates as: ‘When I look at myself, I despair; when I look at others, I’m consoled.’”
Paul Wells in National Post December 30, 1999