“You’re never too old to become younger.”
Mae West, quoted on www.goodreads.com
“Above all, we must insist, as against the utopian concepts, that a tolerable order of things is one of a proper balance between the social and the individual: that a human being is neither an ant nor a shark.”
Introduction in Robert Conquest Reflections on a Ravaged Century
“The progressive person comes by, saying gaily, ‘Why confine your soaring soul within the mere formularies of currants, suet, and eggs? Take anything, anything that this varied Cosmos has evolved. Every brick in the street is a potential pudding. Poisons are but a blundering search after pudding. Make your universal Christmas pudding out of materials as universal as the spirit of Christmas. Make it of glue, soot, potato peelings, blacking, hog’s-wash, rags, bones, rubbish, Spiritual Healers, Hygienic Marriages, Eastern Pessimism, flying teacups, Prussian Atheists, and Nut Sausages – and your Christmas pudding will be Larger, Broader, and more Mystic.’ To which I reply, ‘All right, so long as it tastes like Christmas pudding.’ But it doesn’t.”
G.K. Chesterton “A Progressive Yule to You, Too” from Illustrated London News Jan. 1, 1910, reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #3 (Dec. 2006)
“At Christmas I see myself as I really am. And as I could be, if I weren’t such a stinker. As the whole sick, weary, unhappy world sees itself as it might be, if it weren’t such a stinker. Noel! Joy! Peace awaits. Killings, brutality, meanness is here. Cry world.”
Frank Capra The Name Above the Title
“‘The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it.’ – Franklin P. Jones”
NCC Overview Winter 2002 [they had "nobody is there" but I believe this version is correct]
“G.K. Chesterton said he found it hard to believe in God, but harder to believe that a swamp, if left alone long enough, will eventually build Chartres Cathedral…”
Robert Fulford in National Post Dec. 16, 2006
“A man like him is hard to find.”
Another "He's an extraordinary man" insult emailed by a friend and credited to Ralph C. Maddocks
"real eating will restore his sense of the festivity of being. Food does not exist merely for the sake of its nutritional value. To see it so is only to knuckle under still further to the desubstantialization of man, to regard not what things are, but what they mean to us… A man’s daily meal ought to be an exultation over the smack of desirability which lies at the roots of creation.”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb