“But my time and labour was little worth, and so it was as well employed one way as another.”
Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe
“A general learns lessons. I’m not sure that a politician does. Or that a people does.”
Maj.-Gen Chris Vokes, My Story
“The only reason we don’t adopt an open-ended utility function is because of the law St. Paul says is written on the human heart. But it’s a good reason; otherwise there’d only be varying degrees of risk-aversion rather than deplorable timidity and rashness and between them praiseworthy courage. Note also that peaceniks whose recommendations lead to the tyrant’s victory cannot be declared to be mistaken if we adopt an open-ended utility function; they merely reveal themselves to be masochists. But it is surely no coincidence that abandoning sincere church attendance leads to Anthony de Jasay’s consent-driven Leviathan; it’s only if he takes God seriously that homo economicus doesn’t rent seek. Aristotle wanted the state to be concerned with the good life because he didn’t conceive of separating Caesar from God; homo economicus now wants the same, except his good life is explicitly hedonist so he wants boodle.”
Another of mine, from April 21, 2003 [and very possibly of interest only to economists, or not even to them].
“Fear cures anxiety… Real Schmerz trumps Weltschmerz. If you have had enough to drink.”
P.J. O’Rourke All The Trouble In The World [about a trip to Somalia].
“‘We become what we think about most of the time, and that’s the strangest secret.”
Earl Nightingale, quoted by Jeff Hayden on Inc. online (www.inc.com/jeff-haden/top-350-inspiring-motivational-quotes-to-tweet-and-share.html)
“We are trying to do right: one of the wildest perils.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News September 28, 1907, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
“They peddled on, staring back as if I had gone temporarily insane. It is not temporary.”
Roy MacGregor in National Post September 3, 2001
“my own resolve is at rock bottom, believing the best that can happen to me is to be wounded, since becoming wounded or killed is a certainty. I find comfort in an honest belief that may be God-given, that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. This I firmly belief, and often repeat it to others. It seems to give me some strength. And I have developed faith in the beatitude ‘The meek shall inherit the earth.’ While this doesn’t seem to apply in civilian life, many a meek man displays the fortitude and resolve to carry on here, while many a swashbuckler finds the first way out.”
Bob Suckling, a platoon commander with the RCR at Verrières Ridge, who had just found his batman dead from concussion without a mark on his body and had a lance-corporal shoot himself in the foot right under his nose, quoted in George Blackburn The Guns of Normandy