“Friends, when once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honour and his reason.”
Prince Rilian in C.S. Lewis The Silver Chair
“Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he has not created himself – and is nevertheless free. Because having once been hurled into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, quoted by Alberto Knox in Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy
“When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.”
George Bernard Shaw in Back to Methuselah, quoted on www.goodreads.com
“We live surrounded by mysteries and imagine that by inventing names we explain them.”
W.B. Seabrook, “Goat-Cry, Girl-Cry,” in Chancellor Press Great Ghost Stories
“History by apprising [citizens] of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.”
Thomas Jefferson, quoted in The Federalist Patriot Founders Quote Daily April 8, 2005
“There are, in the last resort, no economic ends. The economic efforts of the individuals as well as the services which the market order renders to them, consist in an allocation of means for the competing ultimate purposes which are always non-economic. The task of all economic activity is to reconcile the competing ends by deciding for which of them the limited means are to be used.”
Friedrick Hayek, Law, legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice
In my latest National Post column I remind commentators that Notre Dame is a Paris “tourist attraction” and historical landmark because it’s a very beautiful church, and suggest that it’s beautiful because of the faith that built it.