“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it."
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in Cormac McCarthy No Country for Old Men
"Looking for fish? Don’t climb a tree."
Chinese proverb (according to "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe and Mail March 31 2011
“A ship is safe in the port, but that is not what a ship is for.”
Author unknown
“Once, long ago, a little crazy hypothesis was thrown across a dark sky and left there. And people could never forget it. Religions were built by its light, poets’ minds shone in its brightness, political systems used its warmth to draw men closer together, and science examined it cautiously and ‘proved’ it to be the essence of sanity, the seed of human growth. It may be only a bedtime story that men told themselves in their loneliness; it may be a lie: this sanctity of the human being, this importance of man the individual, this right of the child to grow, but when it is proved so, there will no longer be an earth to witness the lie’s triumph and no men here to mourn the loss of their dream.”
Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream
“He uttered my name as if a fire had broken out.”
Peter Lovesey, Bertie and the Seven Bodies
“One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing.”
C.S. Lewis God in the Dock