“That fellow was bred by a buzzard and hatched by the sun.”
Whit Boykin quoted by Reid Buckley in National Review April 21, 1997
“What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 No. 2 (Oct.-Nov. 2000)
“One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.”
Anthony Powell, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail June 5 2000
“The process of social life is a function of so many variables many of which are not amenable to anything like measurement that even mere diagnosis of a given state of things becomes a doubtful matter quite apart from the formidable sources of error that open up as soon as we attempt prognosis. These difficulties should not be exaggerated, however. We shall see that the dominant traits of the picture clearly support certain inferences which, whatever the qualifications that have to be added, are too strong to be neglected on the ground that they cannot be proved in the sense in which a proposition of Euclid’s can.”
Joseph Schumpeter Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
“A child is born into a world of phenomena, all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs – it sucks – it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start were they ever magnetized at all – just those particular moments of experience and no others – I don’t know. And nor does anyone else.”
The psychologist in Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, quoted by “Teller” (I believe my note to myself on this source means the author was Raymond Joseph Teller of “Penn and Teller”) in The Atlantic Monthly June 2001
“You have to have a lot of patience to learn patience.”
“Stanislaw Lec Polish writer (1909-66)” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 9, 2013
“Their art for art’s sake was a drunken variant of the stern age’s commerce for commerce’s sake, science for science’ sake.”
Garry Wills Chesterton (regarding the decadents of the 1880s and 1890s)
“usually to be found nailing his colors to the fence”.
Humphrey Carpenter regarding former Church of England Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie, quoted in National Review October 14, 1996