"One science only will one genius fit/ So vast is art, so narrow human wit."
Alexander Pope, quoted in Marshall McLuhan The Gutenberg Galaxy
"'Do you believe in God, Winston?' ‘No.’ ‘Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?’ ‘I don’t know. The spirit of Man.’ ‘And do you consider yourself a man?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors.'"
O'Brien and Winston Smith in George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four
"He has planted his last potato. Han har satt sin sista potatis."
“Idioms from Sweden” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2005)
"'Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save to lie down and die!'"
Hester Prynne in Nathanial Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter, quoted in William J. Bennett The Book of Virtues
"people for whom 'history' is whatever happened two weeks ago, the same people who will be likely to assure us in their next breath that Britney Spears, or some other confection du jour, is the greatest pop singer 'of all time.' Imagine that. All time. That term might even span as much as a whole decade."
Wilfred M. McClay in First Things February 2002
"If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat."
St. Paul, 2 Thessalonians 3:10
“While some knowledge can be a good thing, sometimes too much is dangerous.”
Ontario Premier Mike Harris on why he filled key cabinet posts with people with limited relevant experience, quoted in The Write File Quarterly Issue #5, Summer 1995
"The main impulse of a true genius is not to look into himself, with endless digging into his conscience and subconscious - as Pasternak said, ‘conscience is like the headlights of a car; their light directed outward illuminates the way, directed inward leads to catastrophe’ - but to look out of himself. And to give. And if the main impulse of your existence is the desire to give, you cannot really be a nasty character. That’s what, probably, Pushkin had in mind when he exclaimed in his Mozart and Salieri: 'Genius and villainy are incompatible.'"
Chronicles magazine 1/88 [again I had regrettably not yet in 1988 acquired the habit of recording the author as well as publication when I recorded points I considered noteworthy]