“I won’t be unhappy to be out of the news and go from Who’s Who to Who’s He.”
Matthew Barrett on resigning as head of the Bank of Montreal, as the “Quote of the day” in Globe & Mail February 24, 1999
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up [according to https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/64918-the-test-of-a-first-rate-intelligence-is-the-ability-to] [and one of those I don’t agree with, but widespread elite conviction that it is true helps explain the mess we’re in today]
“At one extreme is the view of the historian Thomas Carlyle: ‘Universal history, the history of what man [sic] has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.’”
Jared Diamond Guns, Germs, and Steel
In 1922 Chesterton in London “gave another talk on Socialism where he said his primary objection to socialism was that ‘it would be a dictatorship, with a tyranny of officials in every department of life.’”
“100 Years Ago” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021) [and if Chesterton, a Christian apologist and fiction writer, could see it so clearly, why couldn’t politicians, pundits and professors?]
His list of the people we get angry with includes“those who speak ill of us, and show contempt for us, in connexion with the things we ourselves most care about.... We feel particularly angry on this account if we suspect that we are in fact, or that people think we are, lacking completely or to an effective extent in the qualities in question.”
Aristotle Rhetoric Book II
“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.”
Ham Gamgee quoted by his son Sam in J.R.R. Tolkien The Two Towers
“‘It is wrong to proselytize among people who have a religious faith,’ says [UofT professor emeritus of comparative religion, William] Oxtoby. ‘No one has the moral right to tell someone they can’t find salvation without Christianity.’”
Maclean’s January 20, 2003 [And approvingly, of course, about an upsurge in violence against Christian missionaries, proving once again Ronald Knox’s jibe that studying comparative religion is the best way to become comparatively religious]
“These folks didn’t become household names – or, at the very least, household what’s-his-names?…”
Scott Feschuk in National Post February 16, 1999 [specifically re various Canadian media talking heads]