“Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes.”
Joan Didion Slouching Toward Bethlehem
“But to give an accurate and exhaustive account of that phenomenon would require, as Beerbohm might have said, a far less brilliant pen than mine.”
Andrew Gimson in National Post May 10, 2003 [his topic happened to be contemporary anti-Americanism in Germany but my point is the insult not its target]
“I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in.”
C.S. Lewis “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State: Is Progress Possible?” first published in The Observer July 20, 1958
Re the 2nd-rate composers who get exposure on “In the Shadow on Tom Allen’s excellent CBC Radio program, Music and Company… One must learn to recognize the signposts of mediocrity in life which, as a friend intoned recently, is too short to drink bad wine…. Probably 90 per cent of the renovations in our major cities would qualify for a visual version of In the Shadow – cautionary tales of mediocrity rampant on a field of good intentions.”
William Thorsell in Globe & Mail June 2, 2003 [ironically the same William Thorsell who oversaw a dreadful renovation of the Royal Ontario Museum].
“The product of over-civilisation is shamelessness.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 2, 1908, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22)
“There’s just gotta be a place up ahead where men ain’t low-down and poker’s played fair. If there weren’t, what are all the songs about? I’ll see y’all there and we can sing together, and shake our heads over all the meanness in the Used-To-Be.”
The last words of Buster Scruggs as he approaches heaven with his harp and the duet fades out, in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
“the decade that taste forgot”
Regarding the 1970s, and attributed to “one journalist” by David P. Deavel in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22) (in a piece saying the late Fr. James V. Schall “never succumbed to the 1970s habit too many of his Jesuit confreres had of wearing the intellectual and spiritual (not to mention sartorial) clothing of that decade”.
Claiming a special French “right to idleness”, radical eco-feminist Green MP Sandrine Rousseau said hard work was “essentially a Right-wing value”.
The Telegraph November 14, 2022 [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/14/french-have-got-even-lazier-study-shows-vast-majority-happy/]; I trust she did not overstrain herself writing that admission disguised as a boast.