“I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: Ignore it until it revolts.”
“Barbara Kingsolver American novelist (1955- )” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail Nov. 11, 2012
“I say you cannot really understand any myths till you have found that one of them is not a myth. Turnip ghosts mean nothing if there are not real ghosts. Forged bank-notes mean nothing if there are no real bank-notes. Heathen gods mean nothing, and must always mean nothing, to those of us that deny the Christian God.”
GKC, “The Priest of Spring,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“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