“All this is the result of your imprudence and stupidity.”
A letter from Pope Gregory II to Emperor Leo III in 727 AD excerpted in Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church & State 1050-1300 [also from my “Don’t mince words, Bones” file]
“For as long as people have been writing, there have been other people that want to prevent that writing from reaching the public. Around 600BC King Jehoiakim of Judah burnt a scroll containing a prophecy he did not like. Plato supposedly loathed work by Democritus, another philosopher, and sought to have it destroyed. (Ironically in his dialogues he warns of ‘the danger of becoming misologists’—ie, people who hate reasoning or ideas.)”
Rachel Lloyd, “Deputy culture editor” in “The Economist this weekend” email Feb. 22, 2025 [the big point here being the word “misologist”].
“The strong minded governor of Massachusetts, William Shirley, took to emulating Cato about Carthage: ‘Delenda est Canada’ (Canada must be destroyed).”
This re the New France militia in the War of the Austrian Succession, in Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present
“I have a pretty worrying hunch that despite all the talk of Team Canada and visits to D.C., our premiers aren’t doing much to get this country battle ready. Too many of them, after a career in Canadian politics, are probably too stuck in their ways of ‘the announcement is the plan.’”
Matt Gurney in The Line Feb. 13, 2025 [https://www.readtheline.ca/p/matt-gurney-i-hereby-propose-the]. [I emailed him to ask if it was original and he replied “I think it’s original to me” but added that it had evolved from conversations with his colleagues, especially Jen Gerson]
“Compaq FAQ: Where do I find the ‘Any’ key on my keyboard? (FAQ2859) The term ‘any key’ does not refer to a particular key on the keyboard. It simply means to strike any one of the keys on your keyboard or handheld screen.”
http://web14.compaq.com/falco/detail.asp?FAQnum=FAQ2859 as of Jan. 6, 2002, forwarded by a suitably appalled friend
“Find a job you like and you add five days to every week.”
H. Jackson Brown, emailed by a friend and widely cited online
“Protestants had been insisting on the correctness of their own readings of scripture, their own understandings of God’s purpose, since the time of Luther’s confrontation with Cajetan. Now, in the person of Spinoza, this tradition had begun to cannibalise itself.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“‘The two greatest problems in history,’ says a brilliant scholar of our time, are ‘how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall.’ We may come nearer to understanding them if we remember that the fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause but many, and was not an event but a process spread over 300 years. Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell. A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars. Christian writers were keenly appreciative of this decay.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ