“Sir, it seems that you are no better a judge of human beings than you are a specimen of one.”
Buster Scruggs responding to an insult from a low-life bandit in the film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs [https://youtu.be/g_XLQDeYqpE?t=49]
“Fashion is but a fickle sort of convention. We cannot be expected to admire a slave of convention for being unconventional.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News July 23, 1921, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
“The opinions which nobody can agree with are mostly in the books that nobody can read.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution as header quotation on the book review section of Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
“Do you really want a safe place? Is that what you want? You want to be so weak that you want to be protected from threat. What the hell kind of life is that? You’re a paralyzed rabbit in a hole. That’s no life for a human being. You should be confronting danger and the unknown and malevolence. And the reason for that, too, is – this is the weird paradox – and I believe this is the paradox, first of all, that was discovered in part by Buddha but also laid forth very clearly in Christianity, which is that: The solution to the problem of tragedy and malevolence is the willingness to face them.”
Jordan Peterson on Instagram (audio and CC which I transcribed) Sept. 24, 2022 [https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ci5ZIf1pm5s/?igshid=YWZlMWU5YjI%3D].
“‘Those who can, do,’ but the converse, ‘those who do, can,’ is no less true, for we learn by doing.”
Anthony De Jasay The State (expressly regarding the possibility that we couldn’t spontaneously cooperate any more because we’ve lived under governments for so long).
“BY ONE OF THOSE QUEER [a word that used to mean “strange”] associations that nobody can ever understand, a large number of people have come to think that frivolity has some kind of connection with enjoyment. As a matter of fact, nobody can really enjoy himself unless he is serious.... Men can only enjoy fundamental things. In order to enjoy the lightest and most flying joke a man must be rooted in some basic sense of the good of things; and the good of things means, of course, the seriousness of things…. The really frivolous man, the frivolous man of society, we all know, and any of us who know him truthfully know that if he has one characteristic more salient than another it is that he is a pessimist.... Religion might approximately be defined as the power which makes us joyful about the things that matter. Fashionable frivolity might, with a parallel propriety, be defined as the power which makes us sad about the things that do not matter.”
G.K. Chesterton “The Frivolous Man” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 3-4/22
In my latest Epoch Times column I call the rather vague Wall Street Journal article about a U.S. government report on the COVID lab leak theory very good news because it means the possibility is being debated not cancelled.
“‘Lieutenant, how would you handle this?’ ‘We could try ignoring it, sir.’ ‘I see. Pretend nothing has happened and hope everything turns out all right in the morning?’ ‘Just a thought, sir.’ ‘I’ve considered that. There’s got to be a better angle.’”
Cdr. Buck Murdock (William Shatner) and Lt. Pervis in Airplane 2