“The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News in 1906
Regarding the new French Minister “whom you have commended as a ‘sensible and honest man;’ these are qualities too rare and too precious not to merit one’s particular esteem.”
George Washington to the Marquis de Lafayette Feb. 7 1788, in W.B. Allen, ed. George Washington: A Collection
“I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.”
Edmund Burke, about Marie Antoinette, quoted by Christopher Hitchens reviewing Frank M. Turner’s edition of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in The Atlantic Monthly April 2004 (how’s that for a convoluted source?)
“To horse, to horse! urge doubts to them that fear.”
Lord Ross, among those making up their minds to abandon Richard II for Bolingbroke, in William Shakespeare The Life and Death of King Richard II Act II Scene ii.
“A hasty general is the worst of generals nowadays; the best is a sort of von Moltke, who is passive if any man ever was passive; who is ‘silent in seven languages’…”
Walter Bagehot Physics and Politics
“I cannot understand how a man who is not a Roman Catholic can regard a real Roman Catholic with absolute neutrality. A man who really thinks that a wafer is God Almighty, and who really believes that rational men owe any sort of allegiance to any kind of priest, is either right – in which case the man who differs from him ought to repent in sackcloth and ashes – or else he is wrong, in which case he is the partizan of a monstrous imposture.”
James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty Equality Fraternity
“you’re as ugly as the mornin’ after payday in a minin’ town.”
“Milligan” in Louis L’Amour The Trail to Seven Pines
“This positions us as a grand city where grand things happen.”
Alejandro Rojas Diaz, Mexico City’s tourism secretary, “who organized an event at which 12,937 people danced to Michael Jackson's ‘Thriller’ in pursuit of a world record”, as the “Quotation of the Day” in “Today’s Headlines” e-mail from New York Times September 8 2009