“‘All the same,’ said the Scarecrow, ‘I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one.’ ‘I shall take the heart,’ returned the Tin Woodman; ‘for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.’”

L. Frank Baum The Wizard of Oz

“the belief of French poststructuralism, exemplified by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, that the ‘subject’ – the thinking, single agent, the ‘I’ of every sentence, was an illusion: all you had left was language, not mentality… Once there were writers, but now there is only what Foucault derisively called ‘the author function.’”

Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint

"With God dead, there remains only history and power."

“Helen’s Exile” in Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays

"the mortadella of philosophers. Little globules of rich, fatty thinking, in vast quantities of baloney."

P.J. O'Rourke on Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted by Noah Richler in National Post December 6, 2001

"if there is any permanent element in him [man generally], his conscience in all probability cannot be destroyed, although it can be covered up and disregarded. To tamper with it, therefore, to try to destroy it, is of all conceivable courses of conduct the most dangerous, and may prepare the way to a wakening, a self-assurance, of conscience fearful to think of. But suppose that the fungus theory is the true one. Suppose that man is a mere passing shadow, and nothing else. What is he to say of his conscience? Surely a rational man holding such a theory of his own nature will be bound in consistency to try and to determine the question whether he ought not to prune his conscience just as he cuts his hair and nails. A man who regarded a cold heart and a good digestion as the best possible provision for life would have a great deal to say for his view.”

James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty Equality Fraternity

"If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man."

G.K. Chesterton in “The Empire of the Insect” in What’s Wrong with the World, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 12 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2009).

 “She stopped. It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.”

The internal monologue of the heroine, Mma Precious Ramotswe, in Alexander McCall Smith The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency