“As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forest and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries…. Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails.”

Michael Oakeshott “The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind” in Rationalism in politics and other essays

In my latest National Post column I say people who want a government strategy for every problem lack faith in the creativity and decency of human beings especially including Canadians.

“King of Swamp Castle: When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built one all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.”

Monty Python and the Holy Grail quoted on www.imdb.com

“Genius is eternal patience.”

Michelangelo (widely attributed online though I haven't seen any reference to where exactly he said it)

Walter Pater’s “Renaissance, Oscar Wilde told his friend William Butler Yeats, was his own ‘golden book… the very flower of decadence.’ Pater’s aestheticism, however – the cultivation of experience, sensuality, passion, the exotic – although possessing an obvious affinity to the decadents, had a high seriousness, even an ultimate sense of morality, that was lacking in the decadents.”

Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society

“I have only one fault, namely, that I am evil.”

Another “Needhamism” from the then-just-deceased columnist Richard J. Needham, quoted by Malcolm MacLeod of St. John’s in letter to the Globe & Mail July 30, 1996

“I could, perhaps, like others, have astonished thee with strange improbable tales; but I rather chose to relate plain matter of fact… because my principal design was to inform, and not to amuse thee…. a traveller’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad, as well as good, example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.”

Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels

“Jack Cohen (a science writer and reproductive biologist), defined mankind not so much as Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but as Pan Narrans – the story-telling ape.”

John Thompson and Joe Turlej Other People’s Wars