Réflexions morales #174 “Il vaut mieux employer notre esprit à supporter les infortunes qui nous arrivent qu’à prévoir celles qui nous peuvent arriver.”
La Rochefoucauld Maximes
“A frightening scene stands out in my memory: three husky Russian policemen, with faces resembling bare buttocks, invading our apartment in search of subversive books.”
Nicolas Slonimsky Perfect Pitch
In my latest National Post column I argue that the solution to toxic anger in politics, far easier said than done, is neither to cause nor succumb to it.
“People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.”
“George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish playwright” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail June 8, 2012
“It is perhaps not altogether a coincidence that the year 1882, in which Darwin died, found Nietzsche proclaiming that ‘God is dead… and we have killed him.’”
Dan Peterson “What’s the Big Deal about Intelligent Design” in The American Spectator December 2005-January 2006
“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