“I wish I were as cocksure about anything as Tom Macaulay is about everything.”
“Melbourne’s celebrated comment on Macaulay” according to a letter from John O. Voll in National Review December 2, 1991
“Well, things are back to abnormal.”
Quoting myself from July 6, 2002 (and they still seem to be).
“The only proposals in the senate that I have seen fit to mention are particularly praiseworthy or particularly scandalous ones. It seems to me a historian’s foremost duty to ensure that merit is recorded, and to confront evil words and deeds with the fear of posterity’s denunciation.”
Publius Cornelius Tacitus The Annals of Imperial Rome
“The moment a thing has ceased to be a paradox it is in immediate peril of becoming a platitude. It is in peril of becoming one of those things that are accepted ‘in principle’ by all unprincipled men.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #11 (September-October 2021)
“I have a friend who said one day, ‘I could resent the ocean if I tried...’”
Anne Lamott Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“Dear Mr. Dule: That would not be a ‘solution,’ it would be an approach. Let us know how it turns out. Cordially, WFB”
William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review June 26, 1995 (responding to a letter from a man claiming more conservatives than liberals were bald and asking if should become liberal to avoid hair loss)
“You cannot evade the issue of God, whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him. Now if Christianity be… a fragment of metaphysical nonsense invented by a few people, then, of course, defending it will simply mean talking that metaphysical nonsense over and over again. But if Christianity should happen to be true – that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe – then defending it may mean talking about anything or everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News December 12, 1903 , quoted in Dale Ahlquist and Peter Floriani Chesterton University Student Handbook
Sir John A. “Macdonald slew [John Joseph Caldwell] Abbott with a single phrase: ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a sweet smile. All from the teeth outward.’”
Pierre Berton The National Dream