“Quite honestly, I can’t imagine how anyone can say: ‘I’m weak,’ and then remain so. After all, if you know it, why not fight against it, why not try to train your character? The answer was: ‘Because it’s so much easier not to!’ This reply rather discouraged me. Easy? Does that mean that a lazy, deceitful life is an easy life? Oh, no, that can’t be true, it mustn’t be true, people can so easily be tempted by slackness... and by money.”

The diary entry for July 6, 1944 in The Diary of Anne Frank [prompted by a conversation with Peter Van Daan who said he thought he might later become a criminal or a gambler]

“Winning starts with beginning.”

“Anonymous”, quoted in Tony Robbins Unlimited Power

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the latest attack on Israel exposes Hamas starkly as an offence against man and God … along with anyone that supports or excuses it, Islamic Jihad or any such genocidal antisemitic organization or government.

“A South American idol was made as ugly as possible, as a Greek image was made as beautiful as possible. They were seeking the secret of power, by working backwards against their own nature and the nature of things. There was always a sort of yearning to carve at last, in gold or granite or the dark red timber of the forests, a face at which the sky itself would break like a cracked mirror.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Demons and the Philosophers” in The Everlasting Man, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)

“Happiness is like a young deer, fleet and beautiful. Hunt him, and he becomes a poor frantic quarry; after the kill, a piece of stinking flesh.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts

“I call these men [the Framers of the Constitution] heroes in deliberate defiance of the ban placed upon this word by most serious-minded historians. By hero I mean a leader of men who engages with clear eye and stout heart in an uncertain enterprise for some purpose larger than the gratification of his own ambition or the rewarding of his own friends, and whose deeds work a benevolent influence on the lives of countless other men.”

Clinton Rossiter The Grand Convention (and it was written in 1966 so this morale-destroying ban has been in place for a long time).

“I know that my plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth?”

Socrates, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” without further attribution in Epoch Times email teaser August 26, 2022.

“Maybe if you got down off the cross there’d be room for Him.”

My reaction to someone overly prone to self-pity December 12, 2004.