“For to feel oneself a martyr, as everybody knows, is a pleasurable thing, and the true tragedy of my position was that I had passed that stage. I had enjoyed what sweets it had to offer in ever dwindling degree since the middle of August…”
Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands
“Boys will quarrel, and when they quarrel will sometimes fight. Fighting with fists is the natural and English way for English boys to settle their quarrels. What substitute for it is there, or ever was there, amongst any nation under the sun? What would you like to see take its place?”
Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays
“What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth…”
John Keats, quoted in I.A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism
“A grandfather and grandson who intended to fly to Australia instead found themselves in Nova Scotia... The elder Mr. [Joannes ] Rutten, who speaks German, Dutch and some English, said they didn’t know there was another Sydney.”
National Post August 11, 2009 (OK, it’s not exactly a zinger... until you add “Or such things as maps.”)
“I think we all have a need to know what we do not need to know.”
William Safire, quoted in Federalist Patriot No. 04-38 22 September 2004 (from Federalist.com)
“What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the d***ed fools said would happen has come to pass.”
Lord Melbourne, quoted in British Columbia Report November 18, 1996.
“It may be that a free society as we have known it carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends.”
Friedrich Hayek “The Intellectuals and Socialism”
“.... and when the patient loves his illness, what pain he has to suffer when he is cured!”
Infanta, in Pierre Corneille The Cid II.5.