“[They use] statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.”
“Andrew Lang, Scottish humourist” quoted in Scott Reid Lament for a Notion
“Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.”
G. K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“The expression [“the Show Me State”] was coined as an insult by outsiders and was meant to suggest that Missourians were so stupid that they had to be shown how to do everything. The state’s inhabitants, however, contrarily took it as a compliment, persuading themselves that it implied a certain shrewd caution on their part.”
Bill Bryson Made in America
“Well, that is one of the things to find out sometime [why the local roads are red]. Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive – it’s such an interesting world. it wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?”
Anne in Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
In my latest National Post column I say because tyrannies are both ruthless and clueless, the Chinese Communists have no idea how bad they look using the COVID-19 pandemic as cover to crush freedom in Hong Kong.
“Few men get killed. Most of those who meet sudden ends get themselves killed.”
The narrator in “The Whosis Kid” in Dashiell Hammett The Continental Op
“sailors pressed into the service… whose skills and fidelity were equally suspicious.”
Edward Gibbon Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
“At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise or wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by David W. Fagerberg in First Things March 2000