“If a rule of the form ‘he who takes the benefit must pay the cost’ is at stake, then solving the problem means spotting cheats. People do this well. The mind is not following abstract reason; it is enforcing a social contract.... Given this view of man – a natural trader, ever concerned with social debts and an uncertain future – it is little wonder that human minds are interested in detecting cheats, not pursuing pure logic, and in sampling frequencies rather than making risky one-off guesses.”

The Economist July 4, 1992 [an article on so-called "Wason tests" some of which people solve far better than others though they are logically equivalent]

“I want to go; God take me.”

Dwight Eisenhower to his sons John and David and his wife Mamie at his bedside in a "Famous Last Words" calendar I had in 2003

“We certainly are not that class of beings which we vainly think ourselves to be; man, an animal of prey, seems to have rapine and the love of bloodshed implanted in his heart…”

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Letters of an American Farmer

“Silence is safer than speech.”

Epictetus, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen Oct. 24, 2002

“If there were no death, there would probably be no religion. As long as there is death, there will be religion – unless our pop psychologists can make us all insane enough to ‘accept death’ calmly and blandly as something natural, as our friend, as ‘a stage of growth’. That’s like telling a quadriplegic that paralysis is a stage of exercise, or a divorcé that divorce is a stage of marriage. It’s the kind of joke only a moron or a sadist would tell.”

Peter Kreeft Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined & Explained

“You are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are.”

Norman Vincent Peale, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“No possible complexity which we can give to our picture of the universe can hide us from God… We read in Revelation of Him that sat on the throne ‘from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away.’ It may happen to any of us at any moment. In the twinkling of an eye, in a time to small to be measured, and in any place, all that seems to divide us from God can flee away, vanish, leaving us naked before Him, like the first man, like the only man, as if nothing but He and I existed. And since that contact cannot be avoided for long, and since it means either bliss or horror, the business of life is to learn to like it. That is the first and great commandment.”

C.S. Lewis God in the Dock

“What, gracious God, is man! that there should be such inconsistency and perfidiousness in his conduct?”

George Washington in George Washington: A Collection compiled and edited by W.B. Allen