“A general learns lessons. I’m not sure that a politician does. Or that a people does.”
Maj.-Gen Chris Vokes, My Story
“Fear cures anxiety… Real Schmerz trumps Weltschmerz. If you have had enough to drink.”
P.J. O’Rourke All The Trouble In The World [about a trip to Somalia].
“‘We become what we think about most of the time, and that’s the strangest secret.”
Earl Nightingale, quoted by Jeff Hayden on Inc. online (www.inc.com/jeff-haden/top-350-inspiring-motivational-quotes-to-tweet-and-share.html)
“We are trying to do right: one of the wildest perils.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News September 28, 1907, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
“They peddled on, staring back as if I had gone temporarily insane. It is not temporary.”
Roy MacGregor in National Post September 3, 2001
“my own resolve is at rock bottom, believing the best that can happen to me is to be wounded, since becoming wounded or killed is a certainty. I find comfort in an honest belief that may be God-given, that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. This I firmly belief, and often repeat it to others. It seems to give me some strength. And I have developed faith in the beatitude ‘The meek shall inherit the earth.’ While this doesn’t seem to apply in civilian life, many a meek man displays the fortitude and resolve to carry on here, while many a swashbuckler finds the first way out.”
Bob Suckling, a platoon commander with the RCR at Verrières Ridge, who had just found his batman dead from concussion without a mark on his body and had a lance-corporal shoot himself in the foot right under his nose, quoted in George Blackburn The Guns of Normandy
“Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.”
Martin Capages Jr. on substack [https://martincapagesjrphdpe.substack.com/p/c-s-lewis-on-climate-change-and-the] quoting C.S. Lewis God in the Dock [https://books.google.ca/books?id=loE7BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA350&lpg=PA350&dq]
“I was eating this orange on a busy Friday afternoon and thinking ‘Dagnabbit, this thing is so juicy it’s getting all over everything.’”
One of mine, from May 17, 2002, illustrating how easy it is to slide into ingratitude.