“The difference between a successful career and a mediocre one sometimes consists of leaving about four or five things a day unsaid.”
“Bits & Pieces” “Quote from Quotez for 20/1/04” (from www.quotations.co.uk)
“The underlying cause of the dependent underclass… is a subset of that fact [Solzhenitsyn’s explanation of the Soviet nightmare “Man has forgotten God”]: ‘American policymakers have forgotten God.’”
Tom Bethell, quoting Marvin Olasky, in Turning Back the Welfare State: A Report on a Major Conference of the Claremont Institute (1994)
“Hair-dos and hair-don’ts.”
Quoting myself again, a thought inspired by I recall not what in August 2001 but certainly reinforced by my own appearance during the lockdown.
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”
Charlie Chaplin, quoted in Globe & Mail March 24, 1999
“by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
The king of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
“L’humilité n’est souvent qu’une feinte soumission, dont on se sert pour soumettre les autres; c’est un artifice de l’orgueil qui s’abaisse pour s’élever; et bien qu’il se transforme en mille manières, il n’est jamais mieux déguisé et plus capable de tromper que lorsqu’il se cache sous la figure de l’humilité.”
Réflexions morales #254 in La Rochefoucauld Maximes
“Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which other thoughts are drained.”
“Robert Bloch, the screenwriter of the movie Psycho” quoted by John Ivison in National Post June 19, 2004
“In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it. This is because there is nothing that can take its place.”
“That the weak overcomes the strong/ And the submissive overcomes the hard/ Everyone in the world knows yet no one can put/ This knowledge into practice.”
Lao Tzu II.LXXVIII.186-187