“As the ostrich observed, Where is everybody?”
Anthony Boucher, The Case of the Seven Sneezes (1942), quoted in “Top Ten Detective Fiction Wise Cracks” compiled by “Gramps", in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 #6 Issue 15 (April-May 1999)
“But leadership is not just about getting the job done…. How many times have we read about a university athletic program that was excelling in athletics but was caught in a cheating scandal along the way? Or a financial institution that made its stockholders a lot of money but eventually collapsed because they violated the law? If as a leader you fail the institution you are leading, then you have failed – period. Once again, leadership is difficult, but not complicated. To do it right doesn’t require a sophisticated chart, a calculus formula, or a complex algorithm, but it does require some guidance.”
Author’s “Introduction” to William H. McRaven The Wisdom of the Bullfrog
“Kings needed help or counsel or money. They wanted assent to their policies and political support for them. These obvious facts should indeed receive due emphasis in any institutional history of the Middle Ages, but it is a delusion to suppose that, by merely calling attention to them, we are providing a sufficient explanation for the rise of medieval constitutionalism. The problem of maximizing assets to governmental policies arises for all rulers in all societies. It is not normally solved by the development of representative assemblies. Our argument is not that hard-headed medieval statesmen behaved in such-and-such a way because some theorist in a university had invented a theory saying that they ought to do so. The argument is rather that all men behave in certain ways in part at least because they adhere to certain ways of thinking. No doubt the ideas that are most influential in shaping actions are ones that the agent is hardly conscious of at all – he takes them so much for granted. But the historian has to make himself conscious of those ideas if he is to understand the men of a past age and the institutions that they created.”
Brian Tierney, “Medieval Canon Law and Western Constitutionalism,” in The Catholic Historical Review (Washington, April, 1966) excerpted in Bertie Wilkinson The Creation of Mediaeval Parliaments [and BTW Wilkinson was my grandfather].
“Many even of the sexual anarchists are already weary of the sexual anarchy, and are groping towards a more respectable relation. But they are groping for it rather than grasping it; because their previous prejudice had been all to the effect that respectability must never be respected.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly July 12, 1935, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
Alexander Pope quoted in “Random Foolish Quotations” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004) [and yes, I know you know it, but in addition to being worthy of recall it’s interesting to know where it came from].
“If you have to swallow a frog, it’s best not to look at it too long.”
Tennessee governor Ned McWherter quoted in The Economist April 6, 1991 [specifically urging the legislature to adopt a state income tax, which I’m against, but I applaud the maxim as a general rule]
“a favorite theme of Chesterton, namely the vacuity of the mind of the man of no dogmas.”
Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #7 (June 2000)
“Most of us can keep a secret. It’s the people we tell it to who can’t.”
In The Buzzer (published by BC Transit) Jan. 14, 1994, not attributed.