“We must take human nature as we find it. Perfection falls not to the share of mortals.”
George Washington to John Jay August 8, 1786, in W.B. Allen Washington, George. A Collection.
“Most people most of the time find it impossible to argue for any sustained period against their own manifest best interests.”
William C. Mitchell and Randy T. Simmons Beyond Politics: Markets, Welfare, and the Failure of Bureaucracy
“The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings – crowded, active, thick... But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow’s horizons are vague and its demands are few.”
Larry McMurtry quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail April 5, 2004
“Silence is all the genius a fool has, and it is one of the things that a smart man knows how to use when he needs it.”
“Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist, writer, 1939” quoted in something called the Freedom Forum calendar for Nov. 1, 2000.
“We need metaphors of magic and monsters in order to understand the human condition.”
Stephen Donaldson, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 25, 2007 [to which I add “Yes, but why?”]
“Another reason is the inverse relation between size and irritability. Among dogs, the yappers are always Yorkies, the things that fit in purses and make you think of calling pest control.”
Richard Brookheiser in National Review June 26, 1995 (his specific topic is why people are nicer in lower-class than upscale yuppie gyms)
“Leisure is a food, like sleep; liberty is a food, like sleep. Leisure is a matter of quality rather than quantity. Five minutes lasts longer when one cannot be disturbed than five hours when one maybe disturbed.”
G.K. Chesterton “On Holidays”, from New Witness May 21, 1914 in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #7 (June 2008)
“In their political arrangements, men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time. With regard to futurity, we are to treat it like a ward. We are not so to attempt an improvement of his fortune as to put the capital of his estate at risk.”
Edmund Burke An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs