“Oratory that would make Churchill blush”
A "he's an extraordinary man" insult invented by me May 18, 2005, on watching then Independent, formerly Labour MP George Galloway’s appearance before a U.S. Senate committee
“‘I can truly say that I have hardly ever been bored in my life… The only glimpse I ever got in my life of the hell of unbearable monotony, of something I felt I would rather die than endure, was in some of those films describing the fast and fashionable life of New York.’”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Unpsychological Age” in Sidelights, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #4 (Jan-Feb. 2006)
“All serious political and moral philosophy, and thus any serious social inquiry, must begin with an understanding of human nature. Though society and its institutions shape man, man’s nature sets limits on the kinds of societies we can have. Cicero said that the nature of law must be founded on the nature of man (a natura hominis discenda est natura juris).”
James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature
“The cost of sending a letter used to depend on the distance the letter had to travel, but [Difference Engine inventor Charles Babbage] Babbage pointed out that the cost of the labor required to calculate the price for each letter was more than the cost of the postage.”
Simon Singh The Code Book
“With G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and Maurice Baring, I never differed—except in opinion.”
John Buchan, quoted by Roger Kimball, in The New Criterion September 2003
“I have read that ‘there is no justice until the sword creates it, establishes it, guarantees it, gives it substance and significance.’”
Bernita Harris, whose military family included a grandfather who fought in WWI, interviewed in Ottawa Citizen May 26, 2000
“Brian Mulroney: ‘There is no one quite like him.’”
Charles Gordon in Ottawa Citizen Sept. 17, 2005 suggesting how the former PM should have described himself in a taped interview with Peter C. Newman
Re kids’ preference for bland junk food “It is a situation which I classify (along with most other aspects of domestic life) as desperate but not serious.”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb