“I will bloom wherever I am planted.”
MP Diane Ablonczy quoted in National Post July 10, 2000 [specifically to do with internal Canadian Alliance matters but a maxim of far broader relevance]
“We must have a holiday from habits, instead of merely a habit of taking holidays.”
G.K. Chesterton in London Magazine August 1924, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 16 #3 (Nov.-Dec. 2012)
In my latest National Post column I say John Le Carré’s novels were morally rotten and dangerous in practice.
“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?”]