“Search for the perfect church if you will; when you find it, join it, and realize that on that day it becomes something less than perfect.”
Fr. Andrew Greeley quoted by William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review Sept. 15, 1997
“I have been through the depths of poverty and sickness. When people ask me what has kept me going through the troubles that come to all of us, I always reply: ‘I stood yesterday. I can stand today. And I will not permit myself to think about what might happen tomorrow.’ I have known want and struggle and anxiety and despair. I have always had to work beyond the limit of my strength. As I look back upon my life, I see it as a battlefield strewn with the wrecks of dead dreams and broken hopes and shattered illusions – a battle in which I always fought with the odds tremendously against me, and which has left me scarred and bruised and maimed and old before my time. Yet I have no pity for myself; no tears to shed over the past and gone sorrows; no envy for the women who have been spared all I have gone through. For I have lived. They only existed. I have drunk the cup of life down to its very dregs. They have only sipped the bubbles on top of it. I know things they will never know. I see things to which they are blind. It is only the women whose eyes have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision that makes them little sisters to all the world. I have learned in the great University of Hard Knocks a philosophy that no woman who has had an easy life ever acquires. I have learned to live each day as it comes and not to borrow trouble by dreading the morrow.”
“’I Stood Yesterday. I Can Stand Today’ by Dorothea Dix in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.”
Dr. Johnson, quoted in Chronicles magazine August 1991
“someone has pointed out that it is remarkable that we have a word for people who believe they are being persecuted when others around them do not think this is true, but we have no word for those who are in fact persecuting others without being aware of doing so.”
Ronald Macaulay The Social Art: Language and its Uses
“Ninety miles is but halfway in a journey of a hundred miles.”
“Chinese saying, cited in Quotationary” according to “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail December 31, 2007
“A ship wrecked sailor, buried on this coast/ Bids you set sail./ Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost,/ Weathered the gale.”
“a finely translated epigram in the Greek anthology” quoted in William James, Pragmatism and four essays from The Meaning of Truth
“If persons do not behave in accordance with their own economic self-interest, objectively defined and measured, on what basis do they act?... The economist is well-equipped to recognize mush for what it is, and when noneconomists hypothesize that persons want to ‘do good,’ he quickly detects the absence of predictive content.”
“Is Constitutional Revolution Possible in Democracy?” in Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy
“I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”
Susan Sontag, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail July 23 2001