“Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.”

Rudyard Kipling, widely quoted online (including https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/225625-of-all-the-liars-in-the-world-sometimes-the-worst) [some sources have “your own fears”

“It is better to be defeated than to confess defeat in advance.”

William Jennings Bryan in a letter to his brother Charles in 1920, quoted in Robert W. Cherny, A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan

“An intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, a wise man hardly anything.”

Goethe, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 17, 2006

“We do not read Aristotle to find out what people used to think, but for guidance on the issues of today.”

Here I quote myself, from October 1996.

“L’intérêt met en oeuvre toutes sortes de vertus et de vices.”

Réflexions morales #253 in La Rochefoucauld Maximes

“You always have to go on that, your instinctive trust or – your lack of trust. In the final analysis, there is really nothing else you can go on.”

Philip K. Dick VALIS

“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.”

Abraham Lincoln, quoted in the American Spectator August 1988

“What if lawyers and economists wrote the sitcoms? Very likely, they would turn out so that they more closely approximated the agony and pain of real life, which is really so frightening that it simply has to be funny.”

An author whose name I did not record in The American Spectator August 1988