“As the psychologists explained, one of the things that makes incompetents incompetent is an inability to recognize the difference between competence and incompetence.”

David Frum in National Post Jan. 22, 2000 [with reference to a study at Cornell finding that those who did worst on a grammar test rated themselves best]

“‘The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.’”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Donald Morrison, ed. Mikhail S. Gorbachev: An Intimate Biography (apparently Gorbachev cited it in a speech).

“Whether in Korea or in Tierra del Fuego, in Alaska or in New Zealand, the cross on which Jesus had been tortured to death came to serve as the most globally recognized symbol of a God that there has ever been…. The man who greeted the news of the Japanese surrender in 1945 by quoting scripture and offering up praise to Christ was not Truman, nor Churchill, nor de Gaulle, but the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek.”

Author’s “Preface” in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Christendom has no more truly Christian quality, even in its degradation, than the power of laughing at itself.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News August 5, 1911, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“Surveying the rich experimental literature from which these examples are drawn makes one suspect that something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James's phrase, ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.’”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition