The “Viking ideal; of a man who, in C.S. Lewis’s marvellous description, is ‘as stern to inflict as stubborn to endure.’”
Link Byfield in British Columbia Report December 20, 1993
“And who can tell, perhaps the purpose of man’s life on earth consists precisely in this uninterrupted striving after a goal. That is to say, the purpose is life itself and not the goal…”
Fyodor Dostoevsky “Notes from Underground” in Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and selections from The House of the Dead
“Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.”
Ovid (43 B.C. to 18 A.D.) in Robert Byrne, ed., 1,911 Best things anybody ever said
“He also acknowledged that his story had a movie-of-the-week quality to it. ‘The trouble is, I’m one of the actors,’ he said. ‘It’s my life.’”
Some guy who had suffered a most peculiar and devastating misfortune, in Maclean’s August 2, 1993
“She [Iris Murdoch] cannot believe in a personal God, she says, because God cannot be ‘a thing among other things.’ That is disappointing. One learns in Christian Theology 101 that God is not a thing among things, an existent among existents, but the Absolute Being of all that is, was, or ever can be. But apparently Iris Murdoch did not learn that in her Anglo-Irish Protestant childhood. It is truly disconcerting how often this happens. One encounters people who say they do not believe in God only to discover, upon examination, that the God they do not believe in I do not believe in either. But it is especially disconcerting in someone of the intellectual stature of Iris Murdoch.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things December 2003
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
E.B. White, emailed by a friend and confirmed online by e.g. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/e_b_white_106410
“Scandalous rumors concerning the state of the times had reached my ears.”
Jupiter in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Charlotte F. Otten, ed. A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves In Western Culture.
In my latest Epoch Times column I explain why we talk a lot less about free speech than we used to, and a lot less convincingly.