“That is so weird about Jeremy wishing he’d never been born. I mean, we have no control over what kinda family we land in! You’re just….. there!’ ‘A newborn baby is totally innocent. Nothing is his fault! If the family you get is bizarre, that’s the way it is! You just gotta survive, that’s all.’ ‘But how do you do that, Becky? How are you supposed to know how to think an’ act an’ live?’ ‘Find someone you trust an’ respect… an’ try to be like them!’ ‘But a baby trusts everyone! That’s the problem… An’ a baby doesn’t even know what “respect” is!’ ‘No… But they know what security is… an’ they know what’s fair!’”

A conversation between three characters in “For Better or Worse” comic in Ottawa Citizen Feb. 6, 2004

“He who limps still walks.”

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, “Polish aphorist, poet, and satirist 1909-1966” [according to the Ottawa Citizen library] quoted on www.memorablequotations.com/lec.htm in 2003

“Nature is never novel; the spire of Salisbury Cathedral only has to be seen to remind one that one always knew it was there.”

Malcolm Muggeridge About Kingsmill (1951) in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge

“How many men have sold their souls to be admired by fools?”

G. K. Chesterton in “Ring of Lovers” in The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond quoted in “Chesterton For Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)

“When men claimed scientific authority for their ignorance, and police support for their aggressive presumption, it is time for Mr Chesterton and all other men of sense to withstand them sturdily.”

George Bernard Shaw reviewing G.K. Chesterton’s 1922 Eugenics and Other Evils in The Nation. Shaw called it “a graver, harder book” than GKC’s other books, in a good way, and praised his “sledge-hammer directness” and taking a stand, according to Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #3 Jan.-Feb. 2022)

“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