“Mr Wirt: What do you think is going to happen in the next few years of history, Mr Lewis?”
“Lewis: I have no way of knowing. My primary field is the past. I travel with my back to the engine, and that makes it difficult when you try to steer.”
C.S. Lewis “Cross-Examination” in The Grand Miracle
“Gambling is a tax for people who can’t do math.”
Variously attributed in various forms, sometimes singling out lotteries.
“He who limps is still walking.”
Stanislaw J. Lec, quoted on www.goodreads.com/quotes/632606-he-who-limps-is-still-walking
“Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one’s horse as it is leaping.”
Julius Hare, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com/2014/01/gamblers-fools-and-egotists-59-still_31.html
“Innocent Louis [XVI] bears the sins of many generations: he too experiences that man’s tribunal is not in this Earth; that if he had no Higher one, it were not well with him.”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
“I don’t know what to say.”
James Rockford in “The Rockford Files”, on being presented over his protests with a cheque for his work from some fabulously rich woman only to find it’s for $125 (the episode aired A&E Nov. 11, 1995) (another example of fake praise from my “He’s an extraordinary man” files)
“For there is only one happiness possible or conceivable under the sun, and that is enthusiasm – that strange and splendid word that has passed through so many vicissitudes, which meant, in the eighteenth century, the condition of a lunatic, and in ancient Greece, the presence of a god.”
GKC in an essay on Tolstoy quoted by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #6 [it was an essay Schall found in the library of the U of Virginia that he had never seen before].
“Researchers have identified ‘structural’ historical concepts that provide the basis of historical thinking. The Benchmarks project is using this approach, with six distinct but closely interrelated historical thinking concepts. Students should be able to:
* establish historical significance…
* use primary source evidence…
* identify continuity and change…
* analyze cause and consequence…
* take historical perspectives…
* understand the moral dimension of historical interpretations…
Taken together, these tie ‘historical thinking’ to competencies in ‘historical literacy.’”
Excerpted from “Benchmarks of Historical Thinking: Framework for Assessment in Canada, by Peter Seixas, Executive Director of the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness” in The Beaver April-May 2009