“Pemmican can be prepared in many ways, and it is not easy to decide which method is the least objectionable. There is rubeiboo and richot, and pemmican plain and pemmican raw, this last method being the one most in vogue among voyageurs; but the richot, to me, seemed the best; mixed with a little flour and fried in a pan, pemmican in this form can be eaten, provided the appetite be sharp and there is nothing else to be had – this last consideration is, however, of importance.”

W.F. Butler The Great Lone Land

“There’s an old saying, ‘Choose your enemies wisely; you become like them.’”

Randall Smith in The Catholic Thing April 1, 2025

“Yet, while former [First World War] soldiers suffered from a high incidence of neurasthenia and sexual impotence, they realized that the war, in the words of Josée Germaine, was ‘the quivering axis of all human history.’ If the war as a whole had no objective meaning, then invariably all human history was telescoped into each man's experience; every person was the sum total of history. Rather than being a social experience, a matter of documentable reality, history was individual nightmare, or even, as the Dadaists insisted, madness. One is again reminded of Nietzsche’s statement, on the very edge of his complete mental collapse, that he was ‘every name in history.’”

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

“What is the matter with internationalism is that it is imperialism. It is the imposition of one ideal of one sect on the vital varieties of men. But it is worse than the imposition of ideals. It is actually the imposition of indifference.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 17, 1922, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)

“the time-honored axiom that if something is not worth doing, it is not worth doing right.”

Dave Barry Dave Barry’s Bad Habits

“Blessed is he who has found his work. Let him ask no other blessedness.”

Thomas Carlyle, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience [and doubtless many others; those are just the two in my files].

“I care not what may be the form of belief which the on-looker may hold – whether it be in unison or in antagonism with that faith preached by these men; but he is only a poor semblance of a man who can behold such a sight through the narrow glass of sectarian feeling, holding opinions foreign to his own.”

W.F. Butler The Great Lone Land [re the extraordinary devotion of the French (and thus by implication Catholic) missionaries to the western Indian tribes]

“Time is not the same for the speaker as for the audience. To the speaker it is too, too brief for what he has to say. For the audience it is a grim foretaste of eternity.”

Marshall McLuhan “‘Culture Without Literacy’/ Explorations 1, 1953”, quoted as X post from The McLuhan Institute March 11, 2025 [https://x.com/McLinstitute/status/1899494456417480991]