“As even a Murchison supporter conceded, it had ‘a total want of literary attractiveness.’”
Bill Bryson A Short History of Nearly Everything [re a book by geological writer Roderick Murchison that actually sold well despite its unreadabilty and high cost}.
“The best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write. Because there’s no difference between that and thinking. One of the things that blows me away about universities is that no one ever tells students why they should write something. ‘Well, why are you writing?’ ‘Well, you need the grade.’ It’s like, no! You need to learn to think because thinking makes you act effectively in the world. Thinking makes you win the battles you undertake – and those could be battles for good things. If you can think, speak, and write, you are absolutely deadly. Nothing can get in your way. So that’s why you learn to write. And if you can formulate your arguments coherently, and make a presentation, if you can speak to people, if you can lay out a proposal. People give you money; they give you opportunities; you have influence. That’s what you’re at university for. Be articulate. Because that’s the most dangerous thing, you can possibly be.”
Jordan Peterson “Mondays of Meaning” email December 6, 2021
“An obvious point about history is that if we take a sanctimonious view of such matters as Japanese internment, and insist that we’re so much better than people back (ugh) then, by depriving us of the ability to understand how other people made mistakes it deprives us of the ability to understand how we might.”
Another of mine, from September 5, 2002.
“We are in the strict sense conservatives; because we hold that the old creed and culture of Christendom realized for men, relatively to all that is reasonable and possible, the great art of life which we call liberty. The truth has made us free; The tradition has given to men the sort of liberty they really like; Local customs, individual craftsmanship, variety of self expression, the presence of personality in production, the dignity of the human will. These are expressed in a thousand things, from hospitality to adventure, from parents instructing their own children to children inventing their own games, from the village commune to the vin du pays, from practical jokes to pilgrimages an from patron saints to public-house signs. The mark of all these things is variety and spontaneity, the direct action of the individual soul on the material environment of mankind. The result is a rich complexity of common things, a wealth of work and worship, a treasure which we refuse to abandon at our resolute to defend.”
G.K. Chesterton in the 3rd edition of G.K.’s Weekly March-September 1926 quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“I believe that people are stronger than their misfortunes.”
Jordan Peterson, quoting himself on Instagram 17/5/22 [https://www.instagram.com/p/CdqTBOxMOFq/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY=]
“‘Shucks,’ he [Thomas Edison] told a discouraged co-worker during one trying series of experiments, ‘we haven’t failed. We now know a thousand things that won’t work, so we’re that much closer to finding what will.’”
Edison’s son Charles, quoted in William Bennett The Book of Virtues [BTW a friend once emailed me this version: “I haven’t failed, I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” They attributed it to Benjamin Franklin which appears to be spurious, but it is also widely available on line as being from Edison and I suspect it is an erroneous version of the above.]
“fairy land arouses [in the child] a longing for he knows not what.”
C.S. Lewis quoted by David W. Fagerberg in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 17 #1 (9-10/13)
“The were-Scot appears to be a normal human being, but under the influence of a full wallet sprouts red hair, a kilt and a thick brogue and roams the land in quest of haggis.”
I hope it's funny because it's one of mine, from July 14, 2002.