“While some knowledge can be a good thing, sometimes too much is dangerous.”
Ontario Premier Mike Harris on why he filled key cabinet posts with people with limited relevant experience, quoted in The Write File Quarterly Issue #5, Summer 1995
"The main impulse of a true genius is not to look into himself, with endless digging into his conscience and subconscious - as Pasternak said, ‘conscience is like the headlights of a car; their light directed outward illuminates the way, directed inward leads to catastrophe’ - but to look out of himself. And to give. And if the main impulse of your existence is the desire to give, you cannot really be a nasty character. That’s what, probably, Pushkin had in mind when he exclaimed in his Mozart and Salieri: 'Genius and villainy are incompatible.'"
Chronicles magazine 1/88 [again I had regrettably not yet in 1988 acquired the habit of recording the author as well as publication when I recorded points I considered noteworthy]
"The one thing we know about life is that we never get out alive, so why not live like a proud man?"
Owen Chantry in Louis L’Amour Over on the Dry Side
"It was said that the noble Don Quixote de la Mancha had been the last of the true knights. After his death, his trusted sword and his armour were sold to pay his debts. But somehow or other that sword seems to have fallen into the hands of a number of men. Washington carried it during the hopeless days of Valley Forge. It was the only defence of Gordon, when he had refused to desert the people who had been entrusted to his care, and stayed to meet his death in the besieged fortress of Khartoum. And I am not quite sure but that it proved of invaluable strength in winning the Great War."
Hendrick Van Loon The Story of Mankind
"A man who shows no resentment at being slapped is overwhelmed with insults and forced into need."
Blaise Pascal Pensées (one of his examples of the wisdom of “Ordinary people”)
"Some drink deeply from the river of knowledge. Others only gargle."
Woody Allen, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail Feb. 15, 2011 [I realize Allen has been revealed as a pretty unsavoury character... but it's still a good line even if it could fairly be applied to him]
"He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities."
Robertson Davies Fifth Business
“The motto ‘Do the right thing and let God take care of the consequences’ makes sense only on the assurance that he will take care of the consequences. Without that assurance, doing the right thing means taking care of the consequences – or trying to.”
J. Budziszewski in First Things June-July 2002