“Really skilful people never get out of time, and are always deliberate, and never appear busy.”
Miyamoto Musashi A Book of Five Rings
“Unconditional surrender of our enemies [is] the signal for the greatest outburst of joy in the history of mankind. Holiday rejoicing is necessary to the human spirit.”
“Prime Minister Winston Churchill said in his May 8 Victory in Europe day broadcast” quoted by Ted Barris in National Post May 6, 2005
“Now in the case of water, by splashing it one can make it shoot up higher than one’s forehead, and by forcing it one can make it stay on a hill. How can that be the nature of water? It is the circumstances being what they are. That man can be made bad shows that his nature is no different from that of water in this respect.”
Mencius in a collection of his writings titled simply Mencius
“no rational creature can be supposed to change his condition with an intention to be worse”
John Locke The Second Treatise of Government
“The world is not black and white. More like black and grey.”
Graham Greene, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail March 29, 2005
“if Christianity were once abolished, how could the Freethinkers, the strong reasoners, and the men of profound learning be able to find another subject, so calculated in all points, whereon to display their abilities? what wonderful productions of wit should we be deprived of from those whose genius, by continual practice, has been wholly turned upon raillery and invectives against religion, and would therefore never be able to shine or distinguish themselves upon any other subject?”
Jonathan Swift “Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in England” in A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works
“human beings, that is... psychotic apes who want to kill so much that they could not even understand an unconditional prohibition against killing, much less obey it.”
Northrop Frye The Great Code
“The real difference between the test of happiness and the test of will is simply that the test of happiness is a test and the other isn’t. You can discuss whether a man’s act in jumping over a cliff was directed towards happiness; you cannot discuss whether it was derived from will. Of course it was. You can praise an action by saying that it is calculated to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or to save the soul. But you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action. By this praise of will you cannot really choose one course as better than another. And yet choosing one course as better than another is the very definition of the will you are praising.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy