“Canada will eventually fall off the fence...”
One of mine, from February 9, 2003 [specifically about our government dithering on the Iraq war but it applies far more widely].
“In other words, baseball’s highest value – at least during those hours on the field – is the ability to achieve a blend of intensity and underlying serenity which, in daily life, we might call mental health.”
Thomas Boswell How Life Imitates The World Series
“The greatest blessings we receive in life are undeserved. For example, I didn’t do anything to deserve good parents. On the other hand, it is not unjust for a person to have such a blessing, and it is not an act of justice to try to erase it. What justice requires is gratitude for blessings received. What charity requires is trying to act in a way that blessings of the same kind may be more widely enjoyed.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]
“Richmond has a well-deserved reputation for being a hotbed of social rest.”
A famous American pundit whose name I failed to record on PBS October 15, 1992
“WHEN I WAS IN WARSAW I had occasion to pass and re-pass the statue of Copernicus… He sits there with his astronomical globe, looking down the main thoroughfare of the newly-liberated capital of his country… He has always been one of the great glories of Poland; though I am aware that the German professors have attempted to prove that he was really a German. But as they have done the same for Virgil, Dante, and the Twelve Apostles, I am inclined to think tradition has more of the sobriety of truth.”
G.K. Chesterton “On Three Names” reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
“There is no better proof of human vanity than to consider the causes and effects of love, because the whole universe can be changed by it. Cleopatra’s nose.”
Pascal Pensées
“What is the real corrective to the condition in which shocking things do not shock the earnest and ethical people who do them? And how can we make it clear to those who are so inconsistent as not to be wicked men that they are very consistently doing wicked things?”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 28, 1917, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
“Well, I made up my mind, but I made it up both ways.”
Casey Stengel according to Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 #2 (Oct./Nov. 2001)