“Like many of the cocksure young men who forage about cities in apparent contentment and who express their cynicism in supercilious slang, Escott was shy and lonely.”
Sinclair Lewis Babbitt
“‘Whenever a person proclaims to you ‘In worldly matters I’m a child,’ you consider that that person is only a crying off from being held accountable, and that you have got that person’s number, and it’s Number One. Now I am not a poetical man myself, except in a vocal way when it goes round a company, but I’m a practical one, and that’s my experience. So’s this rule. Fast and loose in one thing, Fast and loose in everything. I never knew it fail. No more will you. Nor no one. With which caution to the unwary, my dear …’”
Inspector Bucket re Harold Skimpole in Charles Dickens Bleak House
“Al Gore prefers to say, ‘Well, in my faith tradition...’ As a rule, folks with a faith tradition tend not to call it such. At Friday prayers in Mecca, the A-list imams don’t say, ‘Well, in my faith tradition we believe in killing all the infidels.’”
Mark Steyn's “Happy Warrior” column in National Review Dec. 13, 2004
I Was a Chinese Werewolf by Ah Wu.
One of my invented “Who Wrote What” book titles, January 2024
“When the art of controversy comes back, it will not come from the world of sceptics and iconoclasts. It will come rather from the world of believers and of dogmatists. It will not be the work of men who merely ask questions, but of men who believe that they have found answers. It will come out of the clash of real convictions, which are positive and not negative; not from those who say: ‘What is truth,’ but from those who can still say: ‘This is truth’; not from Pilate but from Paul.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness Sept. 8, 1922, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“All things begin in the mind.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Story of the Statues,” in The Resurrection of Rome, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008)
“Concentration is a narrowing down of the mind – but we are concerned with the total process of living, and to concentrate exclusively on any particular aspect of life, belittles life. A concentrated mind is not an attentive mind, but a mind that is in the state of awareness can concentrate. Awareness is never exclusive, it includes everything. One great cause of failure is lack of concentration.”
Bruce Lee Striking Thoughts
In my latest Loonie Politics column I take issue with cancelling historical figures including famous villains and people you never heard of.