“The secret of success is to do the common things uncommonly well.”
John D. Rockefeller, quoted in an RBC Financial Group ad in Globe & Mail February 7, 2004
“‘All ‘progressive’ thought has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain…. Hitler, because in his joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.’”
Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Atlantic Monthly February 2002
“We deliberate not about ends but about means.”
Aristotle Ethics
“the great and awful book of human folly, which yet remains to be written, and which Porson once jestingly said he would write in five hundred volumes!”
1841 Preface to Charles Mackay Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
“the road to hell may just as well be paved with no intentions as with the proverbial good ones.”
“Preface to Part Two: Imperialism” in Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism (specifically regarding the claim that the British Empire was acquired absent-mindedly).
“She didn’t wait for her ship to come in, she swam out to it.”
Letter from Maymar Gemmell in Maclean’s March 18, 1996 regarding the recently deceased Barbara Hamilton
“If chemicals had power of choice, it would be impossible to be certain that a chemical experiment would come off. If an acid ever prayed not to be led into temptation, chemistry would not be an exact science.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 19, 1913 quoted in Gilbert Magazine 9-10/08
“One of the most enduring truths is that man is a verb; but what human beings can do remains astonishing and frightening.”
Michael Young in National Review Dec. 5, 1994