“her photo on the dust jacket shows a face that, as H.L. Mencken said, makes you want to burn every bed in America.”
An author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine September 1991 re an author who I shall not name
“Of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is the man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”
G.K. Chesterton in Tremendous Trifles
“The moral state of mankind fills me with dismays and horrors.”
Edmund Burke, expressly re his own time, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind
“It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978 (www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978)
“I’ve lived a long life and seen a lot of hard times… most of which never happened.”
“Mark Twain Quotables” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #8 (Issue 57, July-August 2004)
“The world stands aside to let anyone pass who knows where he is going.”
David Starr Jordan (emailed by a friend and widely quoted online).
“Is there a possibility that the government of nations may fall into the hands of men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies, and that this all is without a father?”
John Quincy Adams, in the Letters of Publicola, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind [Kirk added that the specific target was Thomas Paine and that Adams went on that rather than such an outcome “Give us again the gods of the Greeks.”]
“He looks like the dog’s been keepin’ him under the porch.”
James Langton’s Sunday Telegraph guide to expressions British leaders might encounter from George W. Bush, quoted in Ottawa Citizen December 17, 2000 [with the helpful note that it means “Not the most handsome of men.”]