“Jerome K. Jerome, author of the enormously successful Three Men in a Boat, took the line that the sporting spirit was the essence of civilization and called on the Germans to treat the war as ‘The Greatest Game of All’: ‘Come, gentlemen, let us make an honorable contest of it, that shall leave as little bitterness behind it as may be. Let us see if we cannot make a fine game of it that we shall be all the better for having played out to the end. From which we shall all come back home cleaner minded, clearer seeing, made kinder to one another by suffering. Come, gentlemen, you believe that God has called upon you to spread German culture through the lands. You are ready to die for your faith. And we believe God has a use for the thing called England. Well, let us fight it out. There seems no other way. You for St. Michael and we for St. George; and God be with us both. But do not let us lose our common humanity in the struggle. That were the worst defeat of all: the only defeat that would really matter, that would really be really lasting. Let us call it a game. After all, what else is it?’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”

G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Charlie Reese “Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, and more importantly, a two-time wearer of the Clerihew Championship Sash” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024) [he does not further source it].

“If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.”
Will Rogers quoted in “More Random Quotes” in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #1 (9/03)

“The loser says, it may be possible but it’s difficult. The winner says, it may be difficult, but it’s possible.”

Althea Gibson, 1958 Wimbledon and US Open Women’s Champion, on ESPN, September 11, 1987, 7:00 PM [Gibson broke the “colour bar” in women’s tennis and on becoming the first black woman to win Wimbledon, after receiving the trophy from Elizabeth II, commented "Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus."]

“He [Octavian aka Augustus Caesar] kept to the end his bourgeois good sense, conservatism, parsimony, and caution. Festina lente – ‘make haste slowly’ – was his favorite saw.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Ted Williams once said of the latter group [sportswriters, possibly Bostonian in particular] that you could pour hot water on them and get ‘instant s—t.’”

Colby Cosh in Western Standard May 21, 2007 [again bending my normal ban on cussing but my objection is not that you should never swear, it’s that you should do so rarely… for instance here; I’d been holding off using this one but surely you admit it’s funny and could not be said in any other way].

In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that despite his recent byelection wins and high standing in the polls, Mark Carney is in fact already a failure because across the board his policies are achieving feeble or disastrous results, and even in Canadian politics reality matters eventually.

“Modern criticism has come to mean this: that nobody knows what an artist is trying to do, and therefore nobody knows whether he has done it.”

G.K. Chesterton in New York American 30/12/1933, quoted in “Art Criticism” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)