“Of his eighteen years as emperor Septimius gave twelve to war. He destroyed his rivals in a swift and savage campaigns; he razed Byzantium after four years’ siege, thereby lowering the barrier to the spreading Goths; he invaded Parthia, took Ctesiphon, annexed Mesopotamia, and hastened the fall of the Arsacid kings. In his old age, suffering from gout but fretful lest his army deteriorate through five years of peace, he led an expedition into Caledonia. After expensive victories against the Scots he withdrew into Britain, and retired to York to die (211). ‘I have been everything,’ he said, ‘and it is worth nothing.’”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Moral decay contributed to the dissolution [of the Roman Empire]. The virile character that had been formed by arduous simplicities and a supporting faith relaxed in the sunshine of wealth and the freedom of unbelief; men had now, in the middle and upper classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them. Urban congestion multiplied contacts and frustrated surveillance; immigration brought together a hundred cultures whose differences rub themselves out into indifference. Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed. The greatest of historians held that Christianity was the chief cause of Rome’s fall.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ [the greatest of historians is of course Edward Gibbon - but it is not immediately obvious that Christianity caused any of the things Durant just listed including unbelief or sex running riot]

“I can’t wait until American women can’t get blueberries for their smoothies”

Jenna Arnold, “activist and Democrat political strategist” attacking Donald Trump’s immigration policies on CNN, quoted by Daily Mail Jan. 29, 2025 [hinting that she might be slightly elitist and out of touch]

“For, ex hypothesi, he is as insensible to all rational argument as a horny-hided Siegfried, dipped in the flood of incapacity, and unable to think or judge.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, “The Art of Controversy,” in Jack E. Conner & Marcelline Krafchick Speaking of Rhetoric [condescendingly, the reference is to an ordinary man as an opponent in argument but I treasure the phrase “dipped in the flood of incapacity”]

“What is life’s heaviest burden? To have nothing to carry.”

D.P. Diffiné, “The 1993 American Incentive System Almanac”.

“The devil wouldn’t be attacking you so hard if there wasn’t something valuable inside of you. Thieves don’t break into empty houses.”

Emailed by a friend without further attribution

Because of the infamous crowded, dirty, rowdy streets of Rome, and tendency of cheap shoddy apartment “insulae” buildings to collapse, and people throwing solid or liquid objects out upper-storey windows “All in all, he [Juvenal] thought, only a fool would go out to dinner without making his will.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“GAUGUIN AND OTHER EXPERIMENTAL ARTISTS have devoted themselves not merely to the study of savage subjects, but to some extent to the imitation of savage art. Some of them, or some of their imitators, have deliberately set out not merely to paint Hottentots, but to paint as badly as Hottentots would paint. Some of them look as if they had succeeded. I suppose Gauguin would not approve of his own imitators, for he said, ‘In art one is a revolutionary or a plagiarist.’ Remembering the old schools and traditions, we might answer that the great artists have been the plagiarists.”

G.K. Chesterton “Gauguin and the Art of the Savage” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024) [and if Gaugin’s dictum were true it would leave very little room for anyone actually to do art]