"The past is hopeless. There’s too much of it."

Detective Nero Wolfe in Home to Roost, quoted in “Gilbert’s Top Dozen Pearls of Detective Wisdom” in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 # 3 (December 2001)

In my latest National Post column I provide Canada's Prime Minister with the independent inquiry he demanded into Israel's use of force to protect its borders against Hamas terrorism.

“Although an enormous diversity of opinion was behind bars in the Gulag... all the dissidents understood that a society that does not protect the right of dissent, even if the society perfectly conforms to their own unique values and ideas, will inevitably turn into a fear society that endangers everybody.... A simple way to determine whether the right to dissent in a particular society is being upheld is to apply the town square test: Can a person walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm? If he can, then that person is living in a free society. If not, it’s a fear society.”

Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy

"Clever men, it has been remarked, are impressed by their difference from their fellows; wise men are conscious of their resemblance to them. It would be ungracious to suggest that such an attitude is a mark rather of cleverness than of wisdom, but it is not wholly free from the spirit of the sect."

R.H. Tawney Equality

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."

Source unclear but not Albert Einstein (a false quotation magnet on a par with Abraham Lincoln). Various diligent efforts have been made to determine its origin online (for instance here) but regardless of where it came from it has caught on because we humans make such diligent efforts to demonstrate its validity in real life.