More of Robson’s Rules of History: “It’s worse than you think. It’s worse than I think. They are not kidding.”
Me again, obviously, at some point in autumn 1997.
“Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.”
Martin Capages Jr. on substack [https://martincapagesjrphdpe.substack.com/p/c-s-lewis-on-climate-change-and-the] quoting C.S. Lewis God in the Dock [https://books.google.ca/books?id=loE7BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA350&lpg=PA350&dq]
“I was eating this orange on a busy Friday afternoon and thinking ‘Dagnabbit, this thing is so juicy it’s getting all over everything.’”
One of mine, from May 17, 2002, illustrating how easy it is to slide into ingratitude.
“Be not afraid of going slowly but only afraid of standing still.”
“Chinese proverb” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail December 16, 2009
“There is only one intelligent reason why a man does not believe in miracles and that is that he does believe in materialism.”
G.K. Chesterton “Miracles and Death” in St. Francis of Assisi, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4.
“If dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!”
Charles Lamb, quoted by P.J. O’Rourke The Bachelor Home Companion
“As for Martin, he was firmly persuaded that a man is badly off wherever he is, so he suffered in patience.”
Voltaire Candide
“10 floors of basement.”
Then Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022 describing the HUD building in Washington DC designed by Bauhaus school architect Marcel Breuer.