“human beings, that is... psychotic apes who want to kill so much that they could not even understand an unconditional prohibition against killing, much less obey it.”
Northrop Frye The Great Code
“Economic activists are not irrational. When they are punished for success, they avoid success. When they are rewarded for success, they act more creatively.”
Robert Novak Will It Liberate?
“I suppose the terrible thing about humiliation is the certainty that one is indeed a proper object of ridicule. While it is happening we can’t feel that it will pass, that it’s only a wretched moment.”
Denis Donoghue in his autobiography Warrenpoint (based on a conversation between Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot) quoted by Irving Howe in The New Republic March 11, 1991
“Good and quickly seldom meet.”
George Herbert, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail June 16, 2010
“The real difference between the test of happiness and the test of will is simply that the test of happiness is a test and the other isn’t. You can discuss whether a man’s act in jumping over a cliff was directed towards happiness; you cannot discuss whether it was derived from will. Of course it was. You can praise an action by saying that it is calculated to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or to save the soul. But you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action. By this praise of will you cannot really choose one course as better than another. And yet choosing one course as better than another is the very definition of the will you are praising.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“Watching [Nick] Faldo and [Curtis] Strange is like watching two glaciers at work.”
TV announcer re the Ryder Cup on Sunday July 24, 1995, 17th hole
“‘The idea that going to the beach was good for you was a creation of 18th-century Britain,’ writes Charles Leadbeater in Prospect magazine. ‘Entrepreneurs keen to promote an alternative to the spa hit upon the idea that immersing people in cold salty water might be healthy. One of the first recorded bathing expeditions took to the North Sea at Scarborough in 1627. A century later, a string of seaside alternatives to the spas at Bath and Buxton were well established. Before that, beaches had been regarded as hostile places, at best a working space for people who made their living from the sea: fishermen, smugglers, wreckers. Swimming for pleasure, and sunbathing, were unheard of.’”
“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail September 15, 2004
“I argue for a sober view of man and his institutions that would permit reasonable things to be accomplished, foolish things abandoned, and utopian things forgotten. A sober view of man requires a modest definition of progress.”
James Q. Wilson Thinking About Crime