“It left me speechful.”
Me Jan. 1 2024 when someone on an Antiques Road Show clip on YouTube said a valuation of a painting left him speechless which I almost never am.
“This book appears as the world lumberingly and indecisively turns back from the abysses which we were lucky to escape, and which still yawn. Its theme is that the main responsibility for the century’s disasters lies not so much in the problems as in the solutions, not in impersonal forces but in human beings, thinking certain thoughts and as a result performing certain actions.”
Start of “Preface” in Robert Conquest Reflections on a Ravaged Century
“I believe most of the great social reforms of our time will remain in history as Follies.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 3, 1919, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“His cynical grin had about it the grin of death; he grinned like a triumphant skull.”
Philip K. Dick VALIS [re the character Kevin]
“‘The original Latin word [from which distraction is derived] does not mean relaxation; it means being torn asunder as by wild horses. The original Greek word, which corresponds to it, is used in the text which says that Judas burst asunder in the midst.’”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News July 16, 1910, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #3 (December 2002)
“It will be a comfort to me all my life to know that the scientist and the materialist have not the last word: that Darwin and [Herbert] Spencer undermining ancestral beliefs stand themselves on a foundation of sand; of gigantic assumptions and irreconcilable contradictions an inch below the surface”.
C.S. Lewis to “Albert” on accepting an English fellowship and abandoning philosophy with some relief as relentlessly depressing skepticism, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
“Colin O’Scopie, proctologist”
Me Feb. 13, 2024 [invented not a real person].
“Imagine being so intellectually deficient that you convince yourself anyone with a different opinion is corrupt.”
Tony Heller on X Jan. 3 2024 [https://twitter.com/TonyClimate/status/1742668645933949269] somewhat ironically as for all his excellent work on the subject Heller himself insists multiple times a day that climate alarmism is a hoax, very often with the hashtag #ClimateScam