“A good argument, when conducted properly, takes the time and full attention of two people.”
Erma Bombeck in When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It’s Time To Go Home, quoted in British Columbia Report July 26, 1999
“What if lawyers and economists wrote the sitcoms? Very likely, they would turn out so that they more closely approximated the agony and pain of real life, which is really so frightening that it simply has to be funny.”
An author whose name I did not record in The American Spectator August 1988
“But if ‘every man,’ as it has been written, ‘holds confined within him a mad-man,’ what must every Society do; - Society, which in its commonest state is called ‘the standing miracle of this world’! ‘Without such Earth-rind of Habit,’ continues our Author, ‘call it System of Habits, in a word, fixed ways of acting and believing, - Society would not exist at all.’”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
“I can listen patiently to a Communist repeating for hours at a time that Property is unnecessary, because men must surrender selfish interests to social ideals. I only begin to break the furniture when somebody starts to prove that Property is necessary, because men are all selfish and every man must look after himself. The case for Property is not that a man must look after himself; but, on the contrary, that a normal man has to look after other people, if it be simply a wife and family. It is that this unit should have an economic basis for its social independence. If he were considering only himself, he might be more independent as a vagabond; he might be more secure as a serf. But the point at the moment is that I like Property because it is a noble thing. I can respect the revolutionist who dislikes it because it is an ignoble thing. But I have no truck with the cynic who likes it because it is ignoble.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The New Dark Ages” in G.K.’s Weekly May 21, 1927, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 # 8, Issue 73 (July-August 2006)
Réflexions morales #174 “Il vaut mieux employer notre esprit à supporter les infortunes qui nous arrivent qu’à prévoir celles qui nous peuvent arriver.”
La Rochefoucauld Maximes
“When you’re going through hell, keep going.”
Winston Churchill, quoted in William D. Gairdner The Trouble With Democracy
“Now that God is dead, however, or at least comatose”
Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic Monthly March 2004
“A frightening scene stands out in my memory: three husky Russian policemen, with faces resembling bare buttocks, invading our apartment in search of subversive books.”
Nicolas Slonimsky Perfect Pitch