“Did he make it?” “No... but he might have.”
An exchange between war correspondent Dick Ennis (Robert Mitchum) and Cpl. Jack Rabinoff (Peter Falk) in the movie Anzio about a guy who’d shown Ennis a technique for trying to get through a minefield years earlier in China (specifically by throwing large rocks to make a path and stepping on them if they hadn’t exploded)
“We don’t believe in a God any more/ Any more than in fairies or elves,/ Roll ova Jehova we don’ need a prime mova/ We only believe in Ourselves.”
Part of a poem “The Scientist’s Lament” by John Seymour quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts
“her photo on the dust jacket shows a face that, as H.L. Mencken said, makes you want to burn every bed in America.”
An author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine September 1991 re an author who I shall not name
“It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978 (www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978)
“I’ve lived a long life and seen a lot of hard times… most of which never happened.”
“Mark Twain Quotables” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #8 (Issue 57, July-August 2004)
“I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.”
Edmund Burke, about Marie Antoinette, quoted by Christopher Hitchens reviewing Frank M. Turner’s edition of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in The Atlantic Monthly April 2004 (how’s that for a convoluted source?)
“To horse, to horse! urge doubts to them that fear.”
Lord Ross, among those making up their minds to abandon Richard II for Bolingbroke, in William Shakespeare The Life and Death of King Richard II Act II Scene ii.
“A hasty general is the worst of generals nowadays; the best is a sort of von Moltke, who is passive if any man ever was passive; who is ‘silent in seven languages’…”
Walter Bagehot Physics and Politics