“pessimist: a person who thinks everything is bad except himself.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Flag of the World” in Orthodoxy, quoted in “Chesternitions” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004)
“the present era, by and large since the end of the First World War, has returned to the practice and theory of radical hedonism.... We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.”
Erich Fromm To Have and To Be p. xxvii.
“That's what's important, to feel useful in this old world, to hit a lick against what's wrong, or to say a word for what's right even though you get walloped for saying that word. Now I may sound like a Bible beater yelling up a revival at a river crossing camp meeting, but that don't change the truth none. There's right and there's wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you're dead as a beaver hat.”
Davy Crockett (John Wayne) in The Alamo (according to en.wikiquote.org)
"If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it."
Emerson Pugh, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com
“The sincere controversialist is above all things a good listener.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in an editorial in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008).
"The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg – not by smashing it."
Arnold Glasgow, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Globe & Mail Sept. 29, 1999
“You’re never too old to become younger.”
Mae West, quoted on www.goodreads.com
“At Christmas I see myself as I really am. And as I could be, if I weren’t such a stinker. As the whole sick, weary, unhappy world sees itself as it might be, if it weren’t such a stinker. Noel! Joy! Peace awaits. Killings, brutality, meanness is here. Cry world.”
Frank Capra The Name Above the Title