“All habits are bad habits.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Joseph Connors in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 # 8 (July-August 1999)
“As George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, once said, ‘the best qualification of a prophet is to have a good memory.’”
Chris Kilford in Ottawa Citizen Jan. 12, 2015
“human behaviour ultimately derives from human volition – tastes, attitudes, values, and so on – and these aspects of volition in turn are either formed entirely by choices or are the product of biological or social processes that we cannot or will not change.... The one thing we cannot easily do, if we can do it at all, is change, by plan and systematically, the minds of men.”
James Q. Wilson Thinking About Crime
“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)