“If it arises as a problem, your mind will fight it off, because no one really wants or enjoys problems; but if it arises as a solution, a spurious solution, of course, then you will not fight it off because it has a high utility value; it is something you need and you have conjured it up to fill this need. There exists very little likelihood that you will travel in a loop between your parked car and your bedroom for the rest of your life, but there is a very great possibility that if you are tormented by guilt and pain and self-doubt – and vast floods of self-accusation that hit every day without fail – that a fixed idea will, once it is happened upon, remain.”

Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

“Our motive may be taken to be the desire to serve our day and generation in the way that seems nearest to our hand. The battle is not always to the strong nor the race to the swift. Victory in war cannot be counted upon but what can be counted upon is that we should go forward determined to do what we can to bring this war to the end which we believe best for our friends and comrades in arms, without boastfulness or forgetting our duty, resolved to do the right so far as we can see the right.”

Part of Orde Wingate’s words to the Chindits as they set out into Burma in February 1943, quoted in Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [and note the contrast with the tone and content of totalitarian wartime or for that matter peacetime rhetoric].

“From everyone at C2C Journal, we hope you have had a very Merry Christmas or Happy Chanukah and are enjoying the holidays. This time of year probably best reflects the observation that ‘the supply of politics is greater than the demand.’ Even intellectually engaged, savvy C2C readers need a break from the rough and tumble of our era’s divisive, bitter – and never-ending – partisan politics.”

George Koch, Editor-in-Chief of C2C, in an email Dec. 28, 2025.

“I fully agree with Leo Tolstoy when he said more or less the following: ‘People say it’s shameful to change one’s convictions. But I say: it’s shameful not to.’”

Vladimir Voinovich The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union

“Remember, the road to success is always under construction.”

Anthony Robbins Unlimited Power

“We must not suppose that the appearance of the world is the same today as it was before sin.”

Martin Luther, quoted in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [as part of a discussion of growing interest in geology from the 16th century on, including clergymen both arguing for a young earth and using fossils etc. to prove it was old].

“I do not like to speak ill of any man but I strongly suspect yonder gentleman to be a lawyer.”

Samuel Johnson quoted without source in Tom Davey, For Whom the Polls Tell

“Il y a des méchants qui seraient moins dangereux s’ils n’avaient aucune bonté.”

Réflexions morales #284 in La Rochefoucauld Maximes