“Il y a des méchants qui seraient moins dangereux s’ils n’avaient aucune bonté.”
Réflexions morales #284 in La Rochefoucauld Maximes
“To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, the miracle of development.”
Winston Churchill explaining why he approved use of the atomic bomb before it had even been successfully tested, quoted by Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [again, sadly, she does not footnote this or any quotation]
“Troops departing from Japan in the heady days of December 1941 were given a booklet to enlighten them as to the nature of their enemies: ‘Westerners – being very superior people, very effeminate and very cowardly – have an intense dislike of fighting in the rain or the mist or at night. Night in particular (although it is excellent for dancing), they cannot conceive to be a proper time for war. In this, if we seize upon it, lies our great opportunity.’”
Quoted by Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [she does not footnote this or any quotation].
“THIS IS NOT YOUR PRACTICE LIFE”
Inspirational slogan painted over and over on the wall of an Ottawa Lululemon when I was there on December 21, 2025
“I didn’t fail. I just discovered another way not to invent the electric light bulb.”
Thomas Edison, supposedly, after he failed yet again to produce a working light bulb and someone asked him if he would fail 10,000 times, quoted in Anthony Robbins Unlimited Power
“Sanctified people got more fire.”
Musician James Brown, who grew up in the flamboyant evangelical United House of Prayer for All People of the Church on the Rock of the Apostolic Faith, quoted in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“His jokes may be much worse in your opinion than they are in his opinion; but after all they must be jokes; they cannot be entirely shapeless mysteries, like many modern works of philosophy.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Sherlock Holmes” in A Handful of Authors, 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)
“No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world.”
G.K. Chesterton “The War of the Gods and Demons” in The Everlasting Man quoted in “Everlasting” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)