"That is the worst idea... since Abraham Lincoln said, ‘I'm sick of kicking around the house all day, let's go take in a show.’"
Edmund Blackadder in Black Adder Goes Forth [it turns out he actually called it “the worst idea in the history of entertainment” according to https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0526713/characters/nm0000100 - such are the perils of checking quotations].
In my latest National Post column I say if we let our leaders get away with obvious lies it will prove fatal to self-government. And sorry, I’m two days late posting it so the column is missing the latest greasy twists and turns, but they only add to the list of obvious lies told after another.
“A person who never travels always praises his own mother’s cooking.”
A Baganda proverb “roughly translated” according to Philip Turner, who spent 10 years as a missionary in Uganda, in First Things June-July 2005.
“I no longer think of it as [writer’s] block. I think that is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have a problem with your door.”
Anne Lamott Some Instructions on Writing and Life (her point being that you’re not blocked from getting something out that is inside you, you’re empty)
“Perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quoted in The Economist June 15, 1991
“We must not provide against the loss of wealth by poverty, or of friends by refusing all acquaintance, or of children by having none, but by morality and reason.”
Plutarkhos, aka Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus Plutarch’s Lives Vol. I