“A man who dropped out of college to join ISIS said after being captured becoming a member of the extremist group was the worst decision he’s made.”

NBC News July 27 2015 [to which one can only say “I certainly hope so”]

“’I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done, as long as I enjoyed it at the time,’ she [Katharine Hepburn] once said. That really is not a sound thought, and not even worldly…. If he enjoyed the rape, he should feel no regret for having done it?”

William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review August 11, 2003

“with every baby a new sun and a new moon are made.”

The spirit of Adam Wayne in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill

“it apparently takes social scientists much longer than poets or critics to realize that every mind is a primitive mind, whatever the varieties of social conditioning.”

Northrop Frye The Great Code

“She can never again take a step on to green grass without wondering if it is bog.”

Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair (regarding a character who experienced a sudden personal betrayal)

“Once, at a public meeting, some bad poet from out of the crowd handed Sulla an epigram the man had written about him, with every other line longer than it ought to be. Sulla, who was conducting an auction, immediately ordered a reward to be paid the scribbler from its proceeds – on the condition that he never wrote anything again!”

Cicero Selected Political Speeches

“The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.”

G.K. Chesterton, in Illustrated London News Feb. 2, 1924, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 #7 (June 1999)

“When the locusts come, they devour everything.”

Bob Uecker and Mickey Herskowitz. Catcher in the Wry