"Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing."

Henri-Fréderic Amiel in Journal intime
 

"But, when infection is about, an open mind is about as safe as an open sewer."

Nicholas Murray in The Sunday Times April 7, 2002 (specifically re Aldous Huxley succumbing to so many cranky notions before and after moving to California) 

"I sleep like a baby, too. Every two hours, I wake up screaming."

Then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, re reports that President George W. Bush had slept like a baby in the runup to the Iraq war, quoted in Globe and Mail Nov. 16, 2004 (I swear I thought of this joke years earlier but Powell beat me into print and may himself have come up with the gag long before)

In my latest National Post column I take on the concept that a new phone, or new anything, can revolutionize our lives every few years.

"[T]he only thing in life which is interesting is truth, and the only thing in life which is admirable is goodness."

Malcolm Muggeridge "About Kingsmill" in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge

"That old saying – 'You're as happy as your saddest child' - anybody who has been a parent understands that."

Then-U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins quoted by Donna Jacobs in Ottawa Citizen Oct. 3 2005

"He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything."

Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784”
 

"If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978