“The best doctors in the world, are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.”
Jonathan Swift, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (though Carnegie says Swift himself was “the most devastating pessimist in English literature” so not prone to taking his own advice on cheerfulness and health).
“In nine cases out of ten the human race does not know why it disapproves of cannibalism, but I know why I disapprove of it. I disapprove because I believe that man is the image of God…”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 # 3 (Dec. 2001)
“all my first views were exactly uttered in a riddle that stuck in my brain from boyhood. The question was, ‘What did the first frog say?’ And the answer was, ‘Lord, how you made me jump!’”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
The king of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
“There is a type of person who perpetually seeks to excuse himself for ever having been born.”
Helmut Schoeck Envy
“He noticed that his human brothers lacked his discrimination of time and often were forced to wait faster than a Martian would…”
Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
“in the Bible, God actively intervened in great battles and wars. And sometimes, to the consternation of God’s people, He was helping the other side. The LORD used heathen Babylon to bring divine judgment down upon Judah. Has God changed? Perhaps He has reformed in his old age? What would a 20th century history text look like if it was written by Nehemiah, Isaiah, or Jeremiah? Would Isaiah see God’s hand of judgment being unleashed on Nazi Germany? ... Was the God of the heavens ready to share His glory with the earthbound emperor of Japan?”
David Kitz Psalms Alive!
“the general rule that when people are talking like fools they are thinking like fools.”
A note sent to myself October 23, 2020 on watching a certain Canadian cabinet minister in action