“Tourism was the source of history’s original failure of cultural understanding. Cyril Aldred writes that ancient Greek and Roman vacationers in Egypt ‘never really understood Egyptian religion and were inclined to see in inexplicable acts and beliefs a more profound significance than actually existed.’ Thus the concept of the ‘inscrutable Orient,’ the idea of the ‘mysterious East.’”
P.J. O’Rourke in The Atlantic Monthly September 2002
In my latest National Post column I say the federal fiscal update didn’t misrepresent reality, it abandoned it entirely.
“Political conflict, domestic or international, is rooted in the nature of man. It is a reflection of his finitude, his moral weakness, and his irrationality.”
Ernest W. Lefever Ethics and United States Foreign Policy
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
“Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one’s uniqueness, one falls in love with one’s complexity.”
John Fowles in Daniel Martin Chapter 2 according to en.wikiquote.org [a friend had cited a slightly different version from memory at a dinner].
“‘If he is dead to-day,’ he [Phocion to a tumultuous Athenian crowd following a rumour that Alexander the Great had died] said, ‘he will be so to-morrow and the day after to-morrow equally. So that there is no need to take counsel hastily or before it is safe.’”
Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, Plutarch’s Lives II
“It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word. The Crusade without the Cross is a dead word.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 12, 1924, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol 10 #5 (March 2007)
He had not “acquired that command over his understanding which would enable him to believe what he wished without evidence”.
Thomas Robert Malthus, quoted by Antony Flew, ed., in the introduction to An Essay on the Principle of Population and A Summary view of the Principle of Population