“It is impossible to insult a man who is not unsure of himself.”

Robert Heinlein quoted in Spider Robinson Time Travelers Strictly Cash

“Eventually Richard [III] comes to understand, if not consciously at first, that he was programming himself as a loser, and has thrown himself into the elegiac role of one who has lost his throne before he has actually lost it.”

Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare

“What is being asked of me is clear. Whether I have the talent and understanding sufficient to accomplish the task is God’s affair.”

A remark attributed to "the young Otto von Bismarck... upon receiving a very delicate diplomatic mission in his early twenties" according to a writer whose name I did not record in Commentary March 1990

“‘Oh, Marilla,’ she [Anne] exclaimed one Saturday morning, coming dancing in with her arms full of gorgeous boughs, ‘I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It wouldn’t be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it? Look at these maple branches.’”

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Futurologists (whether utopian or dystopian, and in this instance flapping about the Internet) make “precisely the same mistake that many historians make when writing about the remoter past. And this mistake, it seems to me, is to suppose that to change the material circumstances of life is to alter fundamentally the sense of life itself. But life as it is lived is always pretty much the same, with the same protocols of boredom and excitement, the same glare of midday and gloom of eventide, the same petty ambitions, existential doubts, and immortal longings. We can certainly create the circumstances of greater freedom or greater oppression, but the range of possible variation in life itself, in the simple, irreducible sense of being alive, is far narrower than our chattering classes usually appreciate.”

James Gardner in National Review October 14, 1996

“Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist.”

Edgar Watson Howe quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail July 18, 2011

In my latest Mercatornet column I say people should be sad and compassionate not vindictive over racism and riots in the United States and elsewhere.

“We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities.”

John Winthrop, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things November 2002