“We decided the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.’”
Kevin Avram, founder of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, quoted in British Columbia Report Feb. 8, 1993 [specifically regarding their approach to fighting taxes but obviously it applies to life far more broadly]
“Whatever men have rightly said, no matter who or where, is the property of us Christians.”
Origen, who applied long-established scholarly methods of understanding ancient texts to Biblical ones, quoted in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“I don’t know if you have ever turned over a dead animal, but depending on how ripe the carcass is, there is a whiff that rises so strongly that the air itself changes color, and a kind of greasy film of rot coats your insides.”
David Beresford, in a piece on a hideous expensive cheese someone once gave him, in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #8 (Issue 57, 7-8/04)
“I could hardly avoid a sort of suspicion that some of those [Professors] whom I was taken to see had been so long engrossed in their own study of hypothetics that they had become the exact antithesis of the Athenians in the days of St. Paul; for whereas the Athenians spent their lives in nothing save to see and to hear some new thing, there were some here who seemed to devote themselves to the avoidance of every opinion with which they were not perfectly familiar, and regarded their own brains as a sort of sanctuary, to which if an opinion had once resorted, none other was to attack it.”
Samuel Butler Erewhon
“Felipe Alou, the team’s manager and club-house philosopher (and Moises’ father), maintains that no team ever won anything with their mouths.”
Maclean’s April 5, 1993
“In 1550, in a debate held in the Spanish city of Valladolid on whether or not the Indians were entitled to self-government, the aging Bartolomé de las Casas had more than held his own. Who were the true barbarians, he had demanded: the Indians, a people ‘gentle, patient and humble’, or the Spanish conquerors, whose lust for gold and silver was no less ravening than their cruelty? Pagan or not, every human being had been made equally by God and endowed by him with the same spark of reason. To argue, as Las Casas’ opponent had done, that the Indians were as inferior to Spaniards as monkeys were to men was a blasphemy, plain and simple. ‘All the peoples of the world are humans, and there is only one definition of all humans and of each one, that is that they are rational.’ Every mortal – Christian or not – had rights that derived from God. Derechos humanos, las Casas had termed them: ‘human rights’.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“My new philosophy of life: Lethe faire – let me sleep.”
Me awakened from sleep in the wee hours of February 5-6, 2026.
“Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.”
Someone called Arnold Bennett quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 7, 2004