“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
Stephen King, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail March 28, 2007
“For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live forever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, in Heaven’s Chancery itself…”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
In my latest Loonie Politics column I suggest the reason Canadians have been docile in the face of harsh and often arbitrary pandemic measures is that we are becoming a nation of sheep who bleat “I am a rebel” in unison because the government told us to.
“When bad things happen, they are never the bad things that were inevitable. You may be quite certain that, if an old pessimist says the country is going to the dogs, it will go to any other animals except the dogs.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 17, 1926, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #6 (April/May 2004)
“It is my conceit to expose myself to reproach only from others, never from myself.”
Nero Wolfe to the client in Rex Stout The Mother Hunt
“Make it happen. Greatness is not in where we stand but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it. But sail we must and not drift. Nor lie at anchor.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, a quotation that hockey player Sidney Crosby kept on his dresser according to Reader’s Digest Canadian Edition October 2005
“I am not severe – I am sweet by nature. But I defend the rigidity principle. God is stronger than human weakness and deviations. God will always have the last word.”
Pope John Paul II, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen April 3, 2005
“A contest of wills? Surely you’d be disqualified.”
Another of my “witticisms”, from August 20, 2015