“Nose to the grindstone, eyes on the hills.”
Peter F. Drucker Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices
“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
C.S. Lewis, quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts
In my latest National Post column I say the enduring, stomach-churning, decades-long futility of the Toronto Maple Leafs furnishes valuable lessons on how not to succeed in all sorts of areas of life including public policy… if only we could figure out what their secret is.
“this life of dust and broken bottles”.
Mark Studdock realizing with horror that he’d spent his whole life doing things he didn’t enjoy to impress people he didn’t like, in C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength
“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