“The fast-lane fossil.”
My unkind categorization of a certain type of annoying driver Oct. 10, 2001 (though as with “Today appears to be ‘Drive like a fool day’” it could have happened at any time
“Thomas Aquinas… did, with a most solid and colossal conviction, believe in Life; and in something like what Stevenson called the great theorem of the livableness of life.”
G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox”
“The history of mankind is an immense sea of errors in which a few obscure truths may here and there be found.”
Cesare de Beccaria (a.k.a. Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio), quoted in Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle
“Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”
Martin Luther King Jr., quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email Jan. 18 2022; other online sources attribute it to “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” (31 March 1968) (for instance https://quotepark.com/quotes/723559/history/)
“After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickedness in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them. It is no good for Quakers, or any other body of men to uplift their voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they don’t follow their own precepts. Every soul of them is doing his own piece of fighting, somehow and somewhere. The world might be a better world without fighting, for anything I know, but it wouldn’t be our world; and therefore I am dead against crying peace when there is no peace, and isn’t meant to be. I am as sorry as any man to see folk fighting the wrong people and wrong things, but I’d a deal sooner see them doing that, than that they should have no fight in them.”
Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays
“There is a kind of God-shaped hole in many people’s lives…”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“The situation is not as bad as it seems – it’s worse.”
A Greek Olympic official quoted in Maclean’s July 7, 2000
“when I opened the door [into his own office] and walked into the musty silence of the little waiting room there was the usual feeling of having been dropped down a well dried up twenty years ago to which no one would come back ever. The smell of old dust hung in the air as flat and stale as a football interview.”
Raymond Chandler The Little Sister