“I can assure you that no person would be better for the job.”
Ralph C. Maddocks (this from my "he's an extraordinary man" file of hidden insults - the original is Inspector Dreyfus re Clouseau in A Shot In The Dark)

"These [nursery] tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."

G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy

"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