“All this shows how much luck there is in human affairs, and how little we should worry about anything except doing our best.”
Winston Churchill The Hinge of Fate [with respect to Parliament not turning on him in the dark period]
In my latest National Post column I say it is humans, not frogs, who fail to react as circumstances slowly change in terrible ways like governments piling up debt.
“The most essential educational product is Imagination…. The child who can see the pictures in the fire will need less to see the pictures on the film…. So long as the minds of the poor were perpetually stirred and enlivened by ghost-stories, fairy-stories and legends of wild and wonderful things, they remained comparatively contented; possibly too contented, but still contented. The moment modern science and instruction stopped all these things, we had a Labour Question and the huge discontent of today… dull people always want excitement.”
“The True Victorian Hypocrisy,” in G.K. Chesterton Brave New Family
“‘Are you going to go back to farming after the war, captain?’ ‘I can think of better ways to make a living than looking up a mule’s arse.’”
Harry S Truman in the movie Truman (from his time in World War I), slightly Bowdlerized.
Robson’s Rules of History: Anything with “People’s” in the name is a bad thing.
One of mine, obviously, from October 29, 1997 (I did not record what specific entity or incident prompted the thought)
“Woke /wōk/informal • US (adj.) A state of awareness only achieved by those dumb enough to find injustice in everything except their own behavior.”
Comment by Stewart Read on the Climate Discussion Nexus “Pinker To The Rescue” Readout video
“Boredom can literally kill you, according to an excellent new little book on the subject, published this week… Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom... was inspired to write the book by a friend who killed himself out of boredom, and Mr. Svendsen shows how boredom, or the escape from boredom, is a much greater incitement to action than is excitement. People get drunk out of boredom; people give up reading newspaper articles such as this one out of boredom; people contract unwise sexual encounters out of boredom. But the dreadful thing is that even sex ends up boring, according to Mr. Svendsen. There is, in fact, a psychological term for it, he says: taedium sexualitatis.... Humans seem to be unfairly picked out for boredom, as we are for drunkenness and suicide, lemmings notwithstanding. Animals, medical studies apparently show, can be understimulated, but not bored. And, even worse, modern humans seem to be particularly prey … The word ‘boring’ in the dreary sense, as opposed to the drilling water pipes sense was used for the first time in England only in the 1760s. That’s not to say that people weren’t bored before 1760, just that there was a European explosion of boredom at about that time. The Germans invented their word for boredom, Langeweile, at the same time. And it was only with late-18th-century Romanticism that the demand got going for life to be interesting. The obsession has boomed ever since. Nowadays, it is hard to think of a time when one is not subject to at least one of the four types … Mr. Svendsen comes up with: boredom of situation, such as being trapped on a train without a book; boredom of satiety, when you have too much of a good thing; existential boredom, where you’ve just had enough of the world; and creative boredom, when you’re forced to come up with something new such as, say, an interesting item in a newspaper article.”
An author whose name I did not record in the Ottawa Citizen March 12, 2005
He’d “sooner turn you into a lampshade than give you the steam off his shit.”
Tom Kakonis Double Down (the opinion of one Jewish character about the German main villain in this seamy novel - and yes, it breaks my rule about vulgarity but once in a while it’s appropriate)