“I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.”

Roberto Rossellini, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail July 7, 2004

“Nobody really believes in anything anymore, and everyone spends his life in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to face the fact, not to look into the abyss.”

Allan Bloom The Closing of the American Mind (discussing Nietzsche’s views)

“‘The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.”

G.K. Chesterton, “Sir Walter Scott,” in Twelve Types, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #4 (1-2/05)

"Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light?"

Maurice Freehill, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com

“the remarkable way [Stanley] Hauerwas makes friends by arguing with people.”

Stephen H. Webb reviewing a Festschrift in Hauerwas' honor in First Things #160 (February 2006)

“It seems to be the great business of life to create wants as fast as they are satisfied."

Samuel Johnson Adventurer 119 quoted in a footnote to my edition of Samuel Johnson The History of Rasselas

“When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, explaining and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, 'licking the earth.’”

Malcolm Muggeridge in "A Twentieth-Century Testimony", quoted by Stephen R. Covey The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic

“‘I can truly say that I have hardly ever been bored in my life… The only glimpse I ever got in my life of the hell of unbearable monotony, of something I felt I would rather die than endure, was in some of those films describing the fast and fashionable life of New York.’”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Unpsychological Age” in Sidelights, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #4 (Jan-Feb. 2006)