"To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."
Confucius, anticipating Donald Rumsfeld, quoted in Henry David Thoreau Walden (Project Gutenberg edition)
In my latest National Post column I wonder how federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau can say such dumb stuff and how we're meant to communicate intelligently with him if he does.
"Questionless, there is no perfecter endowment in man than political virtue, and of this Economics is commonly esteemed not the least part…"
Plutarch’s Lives Vol. I p. 481.
"It is one of the deep jokes of existence that very wise people and very ignorant people frequently say the same thing; perhaps it is the basis of democracy."
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Feb. 23, 1907, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #1 (September 2006)
"It is an unfortunate habit of publicly repenting for other people’s sins."
G.K. Chesterton, “The Midnight of Europe,” in The Crimes of England, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #2 (October-November 2003)
"'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked. 'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'"
Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (frequently misquoted or misattributed including to Mark Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald according to www.sovereignman.com/offshore/slowly-at-first-then-all-at-once-12909, which warned that it applies to nations too)
"If you do not do what you say you will do, you can only rule, never lead."
"Thought for today” on the blackboard of the Pacific Coffee Company in Exchange Square, Hong Kong, quoted by Charles Gordon in Ottawa Citizen November 11, 1999