“Nobody worries, within the ‘hard’ sciences, about the morality of molecules. Even quarks, whatever their assigned properties of color, flavor, and charm, have yet to be regarded as good or evil. But no work of history of which I’m aware has ever been written without making some kind of statement – explicitly or implicitly, consciously or subconsciously – about where its subjects lie along the ubiquitous spectrum that separates the admirable from the abhorrent. You can’t escape thinking about history in moral terms…. The reason is that we are, unlike all others, moral animals…. even Hitler knew that the Holocaust was immoral, or he wouldn’t have gone to the efforts he did to try to conceal it. To try to purge human nature of a moral sense is to deny what distinguishes it. You’d be writing the histories of schools of fish, flocks of birds, and herds of deer, not people. The issue for historians, then, is not whether we should make moral judgements, but how we can do so responsibly…”

John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History

“Economics is really about understanding the world – and changing it – and not in a messianic fashion, but in an honest fashion.”

James J. Heckman, co-winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Economics, quoted in Ottawa Citizen Oct. 12, 2000

“It ain’t what a man don’t know as makes him a fool, but what he does know that ain’t so.”

The “homely wisdom of Josh Billings (1818-1885)” quoted in Daniel Boorstin Cleopatra’s Nose

“Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.”

“British novelist G. B. Stearn” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail November 15, 2007

“the Doctrine of Evolution has not furnished guidance to the extent I had hoped.”

Herbert Spencer on the question of ethics and morality, quoted in Famous Last Words calendar July 14, 2003

“If at first you don’t succeed, hide the evidence.”

My sister

“A man lives by believing something, not by debating and arguing about many things.”

Thomas Carlyle, quoted in J.W. Marriott Jr. And Kathi Ann Brown, The Spirit to Serve: Marriott’s Way

“The Roman republic did not fall before external foes. It had not been permanently crippled or weakened by long wars against powerful neighbours. What, then, were the faults and weaknesses that brought it to disaster? Were they due to defects in Roman political life or to a faulty machinery of government? Where they the result of an unsound economic system which discouraged the production and upset the distribution among all the people of the good things of this world? Was Roman law unjust, producing social discontent and resentment? Or did the trouble spring from some deeper cause, traceable perhaps to some fundamental change in men’s attitude towards life? If so, was it a matter of altered social relationships between one class and another, between rich and poor, between the old families and fashionable society on the one hand and the unknown ‘common man’ on the other, between the free and the slaves or between the Romans and the Italians or the Romans and foreigners? Beyond all these possible sources of weakness was there a failure of old religious and moral beliefs and a decay of old habits that had in the last resort been the true source of the vitality of the State? Such seem to be the main questions that arise as we read about Cicero…”

Introduction in F.R. Cowell Cicero and the Roman Republic