“Solzhenitsyn recalls a fellow prisoner’s comment that ‘cruelty is invariably accompanied by sentimentality.)”
Dan Gardner in Ottawa Citizen “Citizen’s Weekly” April 29, 2001
“Things don’t turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.”
James Garfield in the House of Representatives June 1874 (https://libquotes.com/james-a-garfield/quote/lbe6w7b)
“It is a strange thing how the pain of seeing the suffering of those we love will sometimes make us add to their suffering by being cross with them. This comes of not having faith enough in God, and shows how necessary this faith is, for when we lose it, we lose even the kindness which alone can soothe the suffering.”
George MacDonald At the Back of the North Wind
“A classic vacuous nemesis of the Fifties was the young, progressive Dean of women who was brought in to replace the septuagenarian, traditional dean of women… who had all the give-and-take of Torquemada…”
Florence King in National Review July 12, 1999
“Since life’s a series of disasters, you’d better choose disasters worth having, ones you’ll enjoy & learn from.”
Richard J. Needham according to an email from a friend and colleague May 25, 2001 (I wasn’t able to verify it independently but if Needham didn’t say it he missed a splendid opportunity, to crib from J.M. Barrie’s comment on the theory that Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare)
“Few believe that France and Germany could go to war again or that Communism could again aspire to be a world system.”
British journalist John Lloyd writing in Globe & Mail March 15, 2000 (a piece Xi Jinping apparently missed)
“More than seven decades after being founded based on socialist ideals, an Israeli kibbutz is producing the most capitalist of foods. Caviar fetching $4000 for a two-pound jar is being shipped more than 5,600 miles away to be served at some of New York's finest restaurants…. Yigal Ben Zvi is a member of Kibbutz Dan who decided to take matters into his own hands. With the help of eight workers, he now produces some of the best farmed caviar in the world…. However, Ben Zvi can’t speak from personal experience. Kibbutz members can’t enjoy the caviar because it's not kosher.”
NBC August 10 2012 (I think - my notes indicate the story might have been from a few days earlier)
“Nay, what is man’s whole terrestrial Life but a Symbolic Representation, and making visible, of the Celestial invisible Force that is in him? By act and word he strives to do it; with sincerity, if possible; failing that, with theatricality, which latter also may have its meaning.”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution