“A man who dropped out of college to join ISIS said after being captured becoming a member of the extremist group was the worst decision he’s made.”
NBC News July 27 2015 [to which one can only say “I certainly hope so”]
“Learn to pause, or nothing worthwhile can catch up to you.”
Unknown [widely cited, sometimes as a Zen koan, without further attribution]
“’I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done, as long as I enjoyed it at the time,’ she [Katharine Hepburn] once said. That really is not a sound thought, and not even worldly…. If he enjoyed the rape, he should feel no regret for having done it?”
William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review August 11, 2003
“He was nothing if not straightforward – and he was not straightforward.”
A “Needhamism” from the then-just-deceased columnist Richard J. Needham, quoted in a letter from Malcolm MacLeod of St. John’s to the Globe & Mail July 30, 1996
“with every baby a new sun and a new moon are made.”
The spirit of Adam Wayne in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“it apparently takes social scientists much longer than poets or critics to realize that every mind is a primitive mind, whatever the varieties of social conditioning.”
Northrop Frye The Great Code
“She can never again take a step on to green grass without wondering if it is bog.”
Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair (regarding a character who experienced a sudden personal betrayal)
“Dig the well before we’re thirsty…”
Alan Sager, Professor of Health Services, Director, Health Reform Program, Boston University School of Public Health, “How to Shape Health Care Technology We Can Afford,” presented to “Affording Health Care’s Future” Massachusetts Association of Health Plans Second Annual Conference, Boston, November 21, 2003 [please do not ask me how such a thing got into my notes]