“If you’re in a dark and terrible place, and someone says, ‘You’re okay the way you are,’ you don’t know what to do about that. ‘No, I’m not. I’m having a terrible time. And I’m hopeless.’ Well, then what? That’s it? What do you want to tell a young person? ‘You’re 17. You’re okay the way you are.’ No, you’re not. You’ve got 60 years to be better. You could be incomparably better across multiple dimensions. And in pursuing that better, that’s where you’ll find the meaning in your life. And that will give you the antidote to the suffering.”

Jordan Peterson on Instagram March 29, 2022 [https://www.instagram.com/p/CbQwpO6Mekq/]

The world “continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords.”

Lord Birkenhead (F.E. Smith) in 1923 according to a writer whose name I did not record, if the piece was signed, in National Review November 15, 1993

“Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the Unknowable. But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”

H.L. Mencken, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail April 6, 2009

“As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”

James Madison, quoted by Christopher Buckley in National Review November 22, 1999

Re a lot of the kids in Haight-Ashbury already by summer 1967 “They’re like zombies, people with deadened nervous systems, people who see themselves as skeletons festooned with flesh.... The result is a young person who has barbed-wire guts, to use a phrase suggested by [Erik] Erikson.”

Nicholas von Hoffman, We are the people our parents warned us against

The “Viking ideal; of a man who, in C.S. Lewis’s marvellous description, is ‘as stern to inflict as stubborn to endure.’”

Link Byfield in British Columbia Report December 20, 1993

“Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is.”

Pascal Pensées

“And who can tell, perhaps the purpose of man’s life on earth consists precisely in this uninterrupted striving after a goal. That is to say, the purpose is life itself and not the goal…”

Fyodor Dostoevsky “Notes from Underground” in Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and selections from The House of the Dead