“‘I’m never an optimist, but I’m always hopeful.’”

Tom Flanagan in British Columbia Report May 27, 2002 (specifically regarding the then-current Canadian political scene but I commend this attitude in almost all situations)

"There is an alliance between religion and real fun, of which the modern thinkers have never got the key.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 11, 1908, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #3 (Dec. 2002)

“In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: If you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth – only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Simplicity is not so simple as it looks.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Return of the Gods” in The Resurrection of Rome quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #6

“We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. Who are we? Where do we come from? Whither are we bound?”

Hendrick Van Loon The Story of Mankind (the beginning)

“let them choose rather to be corrected by the wise than to be lauded by the foolish.”

St. Augustine City of God

“Unmaking the bomb (as I’ve written before) is like trying to un-eat the forbidden fruit. Leaving the Tree of Knowledge alone might have been a better choice, but it’s a bit too late for that. Pretending it never happened isn’t a useful idea. God had good reasons for his dietary restrictions in the Garden of Eden, arbitrary as they may have seemed to his critics, then and since.”

George Jonas in National Post August 8, 2015 (defending the use of nuclear weapons to end World War II; interestingly, Jonas was not a believer)