“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
E.F. Schumacher, "Small is Beautiful" (August 1973).
BTW this statement is often attributed to Albert Einstein, an online quotation magnet (like Abraham Lincoln, who famously warned us "Don't believe everything you read on the internet just because there's a picture with a quote next to it).
“I have also never met a successful pessimist.”
William J. O’Neill, cited in The American Spectator August 1988
“Suspicion: The most powerful reason why some persons want to coerce conscience – for example, to force medical workers who object to abortions to participate in them anyway – is to have as much company as possible in their own bad conscience.”
J. Budziszewski "Underground Thomist" Feb. 25, 2019
“It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades
“The common belief of the age [the 18th century] that human nature was forever the same referred essentially to the raw biological nature upon which the environment operated.”
Gordon S. Wood The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787.
“What in our history makes you think I’m capable of something like that?”
Roy O’Bannon (Owen Wilson) to Chon Wang (Jackie Chan) in Shanghai Knights according to www.imdb.com
“Although God is said to test people at times, the reason does not seem to be that He needs to find out something about them. Rather they need to find out something about themselves.”
J. Budziszewski "Underground Thomist" Feb. 25, 2019
“A strange strand of eternal pathos runs through dreams which comes from the very loom of life itself. Dreams are, if I may so express it, like life only more so. Dreams, like life, are full of nobility and joy utterly arbitrary and incalculable. We have gratitude, but never certainty.”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Meaning of Dreams,” reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2005)