"Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is."
"German proverb" quoted on https://www.hound-dog-media.com
“Cheer up, the worst is yet to come.”
Philander Johnson, quoted by David Gratzer in National Post Oct. 28, 2002
“When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, explaining and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, 'licking the earth.’”
Malcolm Muggeridge in "A Twentieth-Century Testimony", quoted by Stephen R. Covey The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic
“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