“We must not provide against the loss of wealth by poverty, or of friends by refusing all acquaintance, or of children by having none, but by morality and reason.”

Plutarkhos, aka Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus Plutarch’s Lives Vol. I

“I have said that they were truly happy; and without strong affection, and humanity of heart, and gratitude to that Being whose code is Mercy, and whose great attribute is Benevolence to all things that breathe, true happiness can never be attained.”

Charles Dickens Oliver Twist

“Nearly all the most awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable, from ‘A child is born’ to ‘A soul is damned.’ If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?… Only the mass of men, for instance, have authority to say whether life is good. Whether life is good is an especially mystical and delicate question, and, like all such questions, is asked in words of one syllable. It is also answered in words of one syllable, and Bernard Shaw (as also mankind) answers ‘yes.’”

G.K. Chesterton, “Shaw, The Philosopher,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton

“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure: It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”

Oscar Wilde quoted in Filip Palda The History of Tobacco Regulation: Forward to the Past

Futurologists (whether utopian or dystopian, and in this instance flapping about the Internet) make “precisely the same mistake that many historians make when writing about the remoter past. And this mistake, it seems to me, is to suppose that to change the material circumstances of life is to alter fundamentally the sense of life itself. But life as it is lived is always pretty much the same, with the same protocols of boredom and excitement, the same glare of midday and gloom of eventide, the same petty ambitions, existential doubts, and immortal longings. We can certainly create the circumstances of greater freedom or greater oppression, but the range of possible variation in life itself, in the simple, irreducible sense of being alive, is far narrower than our chattering classes usually appreciate.”

James Gardner in National Review October 14, 1996

In my latest Mercatornet column I say people should be sad and compassionate not vindictive over racism and riots in the United States and elsewhere.

“We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities.”

John Winthrop, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things November 2002

“Paradox is the only basket large enough to hold truth…”

Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb