In the modern view "With the Enlightenment… World history was finally brought to its climax, its real new beginning, not in Jerusalem but in Western Europe and America, not in the first century but in the eighteenth. (We may perhaps be allowed a wry smile at the way in which post-Enlightenment thinkers to this day heap scorn upon the apparently ridiculous idea that world history reached its climax in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, while themselves holding a view we already know to be at least equally ridiculous.)"

N.T. Wright The Challenge of Jesus

"it is the only true object of existence to mean something"

G.K. Chesterton, "The Heraldic Lion," in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton

"'Don’t you swelter all day in the sun?’ Epictetus asked rhetorically [comparing watching the logistically nightmarish ancient Olympic games to life generally]. 'Aren’t you jammed in with the crowds? Isn’t it hard to get a bath? Aren’t you soaked to the bone whenever it rains? Don’t the din and the shouting and the petty annoyances drive you completely mad? But of course you put up with it all because it’s an unforgettable spectacle.'"

Tony Perrottet, author of The Naked Olympics, in Ottawa Citizen July 17, 2004

In my latest National Post column I say the Prime Minister's insistence on the Newspeak term "peoplekind" was neither a joke nor innocent.

"Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; wisdom is humble that he does not know more."

William Cowper

"Of course we are lone survivors, of course the past that is our lives is at the bottom of an abyss - if the abyss has any bottom; of course, too, there’s no use talking unless one particularly wants to. But... one can, strange to say, still want to - ... You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions - as many as possible..."

Henry James in a letter to Henry Adams near end of both their lives, quoted in The New Republic October 16, 1989

"A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos."

G.K. Chesterton "The Book of Job," reprinted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 # 4 (Jan./Feb. 2001)

"Complexity is the last refuge of the scoundrel."

John Gross of the New York Times, quoted by John O'Sullivan in National Review December 25, 1995 (with specific reference to inherent tendency of bad theories to be complex)