People From Toronto

"It is the University's function to turn out well-balanced persons with an understanding of themselves and of their place in life."

"We are not born of the passions of war or of the fervours of revolution. And we grew quietly into the realization that, set as we are in a great wide land, with all our differences, there are certain traditions and ideals which we had in common, and which could best be preserved in a distinct society of our own."

"The age which we live in is not suited to idle complacency or to pleasant dreams of past greatness."

"We must pass through the barriers of language and race, of geography and religion, of custom and tradition and we must build on a common foundation."

"Rational comprehension of the universe is not enough. We must call to our aid not merely reason, but the vision and the spiritual insight of the ages. These things we must seek."

"Canada is not a melting-pot. Canada is an association of peoples who have, and cherish, great differences but who work together because they can respect themselves and each other."

"It would be foolish and wrong to ignore the fact that all our universities today tread a very dangerous path. Increasingly, they are accepting government money because they are doing things that government wants done. How great a peril is this in a democracy?"

"On behalf of my countrymen, I join you in mourning the death of your distinguished predecessor, the former Governor-General. Canada has lost one of its most honored citizens and the United States, a valued friend. Vincent Massey was a wise and eloquent statesman, and we in the United States were especially honored by his service as the first Minister of Canada."

"It was Prime Minister Laurier who said of Canada's differing components: "I want the marble to remain the marble; I want the granite to remain the granite; I want the oak to remain the oak." This has been the Canadian way. As a result, Canadians have helped to teach the world, as Governor-General Massey once said, that the "toleration of differences is the measure of civilization." Today, more than ever before, we need to apply that understanding to the whole range of world affairs. And to begin with, we must apply it to our dealings with one another."

"History is the necessary food of good and noble sentiments. It ought to give us at once humility and confidence in the face of greatness."

"Old wives' tales are not enough in a day when old wives and old men, too, are constantly moving away from their labours."

"Technology has been defined, perhaps a little ungenerously, as "a long Greek name for a bag of tools"."

"In fact, in the far North one sees the northern lights facing south!"

"How great a quality is horse sense! Someone has defined it as that something which keeps horses from betting on men!"

"I like the story of Chris Rock going on SNL: him telling Lorne "I want to keep my mustache and goatee". And Lorne said to him "In comedy, we put on beards"."

"When we do well, we do the best comedy on TV. That's not ego; that's just the way it is."

"Julian read the Bible as if it were a work of contemporary fiction, open to criticism or even revision. Once, when I queried him about the purpose of his unusual reinterpretations, he said to me, “I want a better Bible, Adam. I want a Bible in which the Fruit of Knowledge contains the Seeds of Wisdom, and makes life more pleasurable for mankind, not worse. I want a Bible in which Isaac leaps up from the sacrificial stone and chokes the life out of Abraham, to punish him for the abject and bloody sin of Obedience. I want a Bible in which Lazarus is dead and stubborn about it, rather than standing to attention at the beck and call of every passing Messiah.”"

"The rooms were confining, the windows minuscule, the ceilings perilously low. She could not have spent much money on the furnishings, which were shabby, threadbare, nicked, and splintered—I had seen better furniture abandoned at Montreal curbsides. But if her book-cases were humble, they were bowed under the weight of surprisingly many books—almost as many as there had been in the library of the Duncan and Crowley Estate back in Williams Ford. It seemed to me a treasure more estimable than any fine sofa or plush footstool, and worth all the rough economies surrounding it."

"To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one’s fellow man—even a fellow man striving to do the same to you—creates what might be called an unassimilable memory: a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was."

"Evolution can’t be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it’s a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn’t aim."

"The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but enemy costumes, which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it—well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn’t be placed at my feet. The private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Callousness that served a similar purpose."

"You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters."

"“Truth is a perilous commodity,” Julian admitted, “but so is ignorance, Adam—more so.”"

"We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father’s unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars."

"I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents—conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting."

"The village muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Diane ignored the sound."

"If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it’s because I'm also a realist."

"What we cannot remember, we must rediscover."

"The afternoon is too tempting to be denied. It isn’t Paradise here, or even close, but the mimosa is in bloom and the air from the sea is cool and pleasant. On days like this I think of poor old Magnus Stepney’s evolving Green God, harking us all up to Eden. The Green God’s voice is faint enough that few of us hear it clearly, and that’s our tragedy, I suppose, as a species—but I hear it very distinctly just now. It asks me to step into the sunshine, and I mean to do its bidding."

"Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely."

"Fortune had done him few favors in the past, and he wasn’t sure he trusted it."

"These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth’s reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers."

"Sandra had spent her days rendering pass/fail verdicts over troubled minds, applying tests most functional adults easily passed. Is the subject oriented to time and place? Does the subject understand the consequences of his actions? But if she could give the same test to humanity as a whole, Sandra thought, the outcome would be very much in doubt. Subject is confused and often self-destructive. Subject pursues short-term gratification at the expense of his own well-being."

"Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?"

"We’ll do what life always does—defy expectations."

"Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don’t need certainty in order to act on a well-founded suspicion."

"“You learning anything from this?” Tyrell asked. Turk stood up and brushed his hands. “Yeah. I'm learning that I know even less than I thought I did.”"

"Don’t be upset. The world is full of surprises. We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced."

"You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes—you'll see."

"“Sometimes he wears the crown,” Magnus Stepney once remarked, “and sometimes, by the grace of God, he takes the damned thing off.”"

"Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future—and it fascinated me—but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century."

"His eyes were closed, shut tight on whatever battle his common sense was conducting with his faith."

"“But you're a Philosopher!” Julian exclaimed at one point. “This is Philosophy, not Religion, since you rule out supernatural beings—you know that as well as I do!” “I suppose it is Philosophy, looked at from one angle,” Stepney conceded. “But there’s no money in Philosophy, Julian. Religion is far more lucrative as a career.”"

"“It never fails to astonish me,” Carol said. “The tenacity of love.”"

"“When was it obvious she was ill?” “Weeks ago. Or maybe—looking back on it—well—months.” “Has she had any kind of medical attention?” Pause. “Simon?” “No.” “Why not?” “It didn’t seem necessary.” “It didn’t seem necessary?” “Pastor Dan wouldn’t allow it.” I thought: And did you tell Pastor Dan to go fuck himself?"

"[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them."

"A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience."

"Some pious men may find this truth unorthodox and bitter: But Nature, Chance, and Time ensure survival of the fitter!"

"I suppose the pursuit of fashion has always carried a price, monetary or otherwise."

"An honest book is almost as good as a friend."