“To him who is in fear everything rustles.”
Sophocles, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com
“The pessimists who attack the Universe are always under this disadvantage. They have an exhilarating consciousness that they could make the sun and moon better; but they also have the depressing consciousness that they could not make the sun and moon at all.”
G.K. Chesterton in Charles Dickens, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 No. 4 (Jan.-Feb. 2000)
“I’ll bet she’ll be speechless.”
Dave Barry Dave Barry’s Bad Habits (re his decision to get his wife a practical rather than decorative or sentimental gift, specifically a case of paper towels).
“Dare to be naive."
R. Buckminster Fuller, quoted on www.goodreads.com/quotes/37173-dare-to-be-naive
“What I have applied to language, is still more justly applicable to sentiments and manners. The passions, the sources from which these must spring in all their modifications, are generally the same in all ranks and conditions, all countries and ages; and it follows, as a matter of course, that the opinions, habits of thinking, and actions, however influenced by the peculiar state of society, must still, upon the whole, bear a strong resemblance to each other.”
Dedicatory Epistle to Sir Walter Scott Ivanhoe
“Nobody really believes in anything anymore, and everyone spends his life in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to face the fact, not to look into the abyss.”
Allan Bloom The Closing of the American Mind (discussing Nietzsche’s views)
In my latest National Post column I say the university groveling because some social worker in training objected to a plaque praising universities is a grotesque example of the PC revolution devouring its children.
“It seems to be the great business of life to create wants as fast as they are satisfied."
Samuel Johnson Adventurer 119 quoted in a footnote to my edition of Samuel Johnson The History of Rasselas