“I want to go; God take me.”

Dwight Eisenhower to his sons John and David and his wife Mamie at his bedside in a "Famous Last Words" calendar I had in 2003

“Bad memory image of FAT detected”

A computer message I received in late 1993 from an improperly installed CD-ROM program, which then crashed (it’s funny because it’s certainly true of me personally)

“tourist: the sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion.”

G.K. Chesterton in “Roman Converts” in Dublin Review January-March 1925, quoted in “Chesternitions” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. VIII #7 (June 2005)

“We certainly are not that class of beings which we vainly think ourselves to be; man, an animal of prey, seems to have rapine and the love of bloodshed implanted in his heart…”

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Letters of an American Farmer

In my latest National Post column I say Erin O’Toole’s position on climate change is driven not by what he thinks about global warming but by the fact that he does not think about it.

“I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge?”

The heroine in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, quoted by Edward Tingley in First Things January 2002

“Life is too short to be little.”

Disraeli, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“Silence is safer than speech.”

Epictetus, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen Oct. 24, 2002