“I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.”

Edmund Burke, about Marie Antoinette, quoted by Christopher Hitchens reviewing Frank M. Turner’s edition of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in The Atlantic Monthly April 2004 (how’s that for a convoluted source?)

“I cannot understand how a man who is not a Roman Catholic can regard a real Roman Catholic with absolute neutrality. A man who really thinks that a wafer is God Almighty, and who really believes that rational men owe any sort of allegiance to any kind of priest, is either right – in which case the man who differs from him ought to repent in sackcloth and ashes – or else he is wrong, in which case he is the partizan of a monstrous imposture.”

James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty Equality Fraternity

“Most men are bad.”

“A saying often attributed to” Bias of Priene according to Peter D’Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish What are the Seven Wonders of the World? (“along with the advice to live as if our live span will be both long and short.”)

“The underlying cause of the dependent underclass… is a subset of that fact [Solzhenitsyn’s explanation of the Soviet nightmare “Man has forgotten God”]: ‘American policymakers have forgotten God.’”

Tom Bethell, quoting Marvin Olasky, in Turning Back the Welfare State: A Report on a Major Conference of the Claremont Institute (1994)

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

Charlie Chaplin, quoted in Globe & Mail March 24, 1999

“by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

The king of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels

“Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which other thoughts are drained.”

“Robert Bloch, the screenwriter of the movie Psycho” quoted by John Ivison in National Post June 19, 2004

“In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it. This is because there is nothing that can take its place.”

“That the weak overcomes the strong/ And the submissive overcomes the hard/ Everyone in the world knows yet no one can put/ This knowledge into practice.”

Lao Tzu II.LXXVIII.186-187