“You can no more evade in politics the question, What is true in religion? than you can do sums right without prejudice to a difference of opinion upon the multiplication table.”
James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty Equality Fraternity
“Does your garage door put the ugh in ugly?”
Crawford Door Sales ad on NBC 14/4/90
“There are four varieties in society: the lovers, the ambitious, observers and fools. The fools are the happiest.”
“Hippolyte Taine French critic and historian (1828-93)” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail Feb. 20, 2013
“He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.”
Edmund Burke in his “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol”, cited in Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics & Belief
“Ce qui paraît générosité n’est souvent qu’une ambition déguisée qui méprise de petits intérêts, pour aller à de plus grands.”
Réflexions morales #246 in La Rochefoucauld Maximes
“To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”
Joan Didion Slouching Toward Bethlehem
At the Masters golf tournament “There’s a strict limit on the number of spectators and the waiting list for new attendees was so unwieldly they stopped taking applications in 1972… In August, 2000, I got a letter from the Masters folks telling me that the waiting list, closed 28 years earlier, was finally used up.”
George Brimmell in Ottawa Citizen “Citizen Weekly” April 4, 2004 (he did get in)
“Did someone already make the point that if faith in God is absurd, faith in man is pitiful?”
Again I quote myself, a thought prompted on August 14, 2001 by forced abortions in the People’s Republic of China