“always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?”
Gabriel Syme in G.K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday
“History is still in the hands of individuals, who by their actions perform God’s miracles.”
James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg The Great Reckoning
“Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure.”
Don Wilder, quoted on https://www.hound-dog-media.com/2014/01/gamblers-fools-and-egotists-59-still_31.html
“it ain’t over until it’s over and then it ain’t over.”
Yogi Berra, according to Jeffrey Simpson in Globe & Mail August 14, 2001
“By his own admission, [actor Stephen] Fry can’t dance and couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles.”
Rod Dreher in National Review May 31, 1999
“Laugh while you can still breathe.”
Another of mine, from March 2, 1989.
“Those who blame everything on the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919, equally miss the point: no Versailles could ‘justify’ the rise of Nazism, which had much deeper causes, as well as much shallower.”
David Warren in Ottawa Citizen June 7, 2003
“All vulgar errors arise from education. The uneducated are generally right: the badly educated are always wrong.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness August 20, 1914, quoted in standalone boxed quotations headed “Education” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)