“When it [Queen’s University] opened its first classes in 1842, its first professor, the Reverend Peter Colin Campbell, taught classical literature. In its Memorial Room to the school’s war dead, there is an inscription around the wall, from Wordsworth, another provocative conditional: ‘We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold which Milton held.’”

Joseph Brean in National Post January 26, 2024 [heckling the way Queen’s was handling its funding crisis].

“A dreadful rumour as to an engagement which had been one of its [some party’s] accursed fruits tormented me with the fresh certainty that I had not been missed, and bred in me that most desolating brand of cynicism which is produced by defeat through insignificance.”

Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands

“An eagle hunts no flies.”

A Saxon proverb over the desk of Col. Hans Oster, head of Department Z (HQ and central registry) of the Abwehr and an important member of the Schwarze Kapelle according to Anthony Cave Brown, Bodyguard of Lies: The Exraordinary, True Story of the Clandestine War of Deception that Hid the Secrets of D-Day from Hitler and Sealed the Allied Victory [he calls Oster “A Saxon horse gunner who was at once elegant and arrogant” and says he was openly contemptuous of Hitler and the Nazis.

“The history of mankind is the history of ideas.”

Ludwig von Mises Planned Chaos [1st sentence of “The Liberation of the Demons”]

“The whole conscious and subconscious trend of modernism is the distrust, and even the detestation, of the ordinary man.”

G.K. Chesterton in New Witness March 9, 1916, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)

“Why, unhappy man, do you thus take pains to exonerate fortune of your heaviest charge against her, by conduct that will make it seem that you are not unjustly in calamity, and that it is not your present condition, but your former happiness, that was more than your deserts? And why depreciate also my victory, and make my conquests insignificant, by proving yourself a coward, and a foe beneath a Roman?”

Aemilius Paulus to Perseus when the latter abased himself in defeat, according to Plutarch’s Lives I

“Charlemagne receives a buffet that goes near to bring him down: the voice of St Gabriel, rallying him, has that tart stringency which distinguishes the Divine word from pious vapourings: ‘And what’, said he, ‘art thou about, great King?’”

Dorothy L. Sayers’ introduction to The Song of Roland

“There followed a long and intricate rivalry for leadership between the various Anglo-Saxon kings which occupied the seventh and eighth centuries. It was highly important to those whose span of life was cast in that period, but it left small marks on the subsequent course of history.”

Winston Churchill A History of the English-Speaking Peoples A One-Volume Abridgement by Christopher Lee