“Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been different.”
Pascal Pensées
“Antisemitism is both a sort of mental impairment and a barrier to learning. If you think that ‘the Jews’ control the banks, you don’t understand finance, and will never understand it because you have this happy conspiracy theory and you think you already know everything. If you think ‘the Jews’ control the weather with their space lasers, you’re not going to bother to study meteorological science. A society in which this kind of antisemitism is prevalent is not going to be a sign of a society on the cutting edge of science or business or economics or anything else. In our society, these beliefs are toxic. They’re terrible for Jews, but they are actually poison to what makes America, America.”
Walter Russell Mead in conversation with Bari Weiss on The Free Press October 31, 2023 [https://www.thefp.com/p/are-we-tipping-into-world-war-three].
“Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.”
Bertrand Russell, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail April 16, 2007.
“You don’t hit off tackle in baseball, and you can’t play the game with your teeth gritted.”
Ray Miller, Baltimore Orioles pitching coach, quoted in Thomas Boswell How Life Imitates the World Series
“Modern man is in a terrible predicament. He is helplessly enamored with the beauty of what the old world built, yet despises the beliefs that inspired them to build it.”
Post on X by Culture Critic (@Culture_Crit) October 12, 2023 [https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1712522023048520098].
“The decay of academia: from Sis Boombah to Trans Boombah in 3 generations.”
Another of mine, from October 14, 2023.
“More things are missed because they are too big to be seen than because they are too small to be seen.”
G.K. Chesterton in America August 30, 1930, quoted in “Chesterton For Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“To [British novelist Graham] Swift, history is not an abstract force but, as he puts it, the story ‘of how little people lived through big things.’”
A writer whose name I did not record in Maclean’s May 6, 1996