Chapter 3

What country is more like a child playing in the traffic than Canada? Yes: "God, keep our land..."

Behind every great man is a little woman, but usually not for long.

Children might be cannibals, if they could only conceive of eating each other. Something every teacher understands.

The cynic is usually a naïf who only thinks he has seen it all, unless he has been to Rio for Carnival.

In the end, most of the Old Testament prophets were old men who forgot that they were young once.

With Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy notable exceptions, successful politicians are rarely accomplished writers. Even rarer is the politician who is a great thinker.

Memory is like the jaws of a dog: it clenches its teeth very tightly.

The miracle isn't that so many marriage fail; it's that any succeed at all.

The most successful politician is the one who can steal part of his opponents' program and demolish the opposition for a generation. Otto von Bismark, who introduced old-age pensions in Germany.

He who gives a woman a wedding ring has paid a prostitute. He who gives a man twenty goats for his daughter's hand has paid a pimp.

In general, men want their freedom while women want security. But again, I generalize...

The wife resents the streetwalker for the same reason that the North American autoworker resents his or her counterpart in China: you can't compete with those who will work for slave wages.

"Survival of the fittest" is only seductive for those who can keep up a rigorous training regimen. After a few twisted ankles and twisted knees, one almost becomes a Christian.

Who can verbally face his mortality without sounding morbid to the people around him?

Where philosophy and religion part, if only briefly: the believer seeks tried and true answers; the philosopher, new questions. But in the end, the philosopher usually only comes up with a new way of asking and answering the same old questions.