“I began listening more carefully to what my father had to say after the Churchill speech, for my father was clear in his own mind about where his loyalties lay. Having known persecution in Poland [he was Jewish], having served with his brothers in the British Army during the First World War, and having been a fierce patriot in his land of adoption, my father was an outspoken advocate of British freedom. ‘This is the one place where people are still free,’ he would tell me. ‘If you have to choose between giving in and fighting, fight; just remember that. Fight with everything you’ve got.’”

Jack Maurice Nissen Winning the Radar War

“in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential…. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel. And the reason why the lives of the rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can choose the events…. It is vain for the supercilious moderns to talk of being in uncongenial surroundings. To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings…. the moderns, who imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a complete state of what they call liberty…. They say they wish to be, as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe as weak as themselves.”

G.K. Chesterton Heretics

“We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.”

Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, in Memphis, Tenn., April 3, 1968 [the day before he was assassinated] quoted by Jamil Jivani in National Post January 17, 2023

“To have a passing fever, or the smallpox is nothing, but to be oppressed by a feeling of faintness for whole years, to see all one’s relish for things destroyed, to have yet enough life to want to enjoy it but too little strength to do so, to become useless and unbearable to oneself, to die little by little, that is what I have suffered, and what has been more cruel than all my other trials.”

Voltaire, quoted in Cleveland Bruce Chase The Young Voltaire [in his first letter on returning to France from a youthful trip to England where he learned much but found the climate horrible]

“Though no one can go back and make a brand-new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand-new ending.”

Carl Bard, quoted by Jeff Hayden on Inc. online (www.inc.com/jeff-haden/top-350-inspiring-motivational-quotes-to-tweet-and-share.html)

“Kierkegaard talks about the idea of being a knight of faith, and he is classed with the Christian existentialists as a consequence of the practicalities of his view. He basically puts forward a proposition that I think is akin to the proposition that undergirds marriage, which is: You cannot find out whether creation is good or evil without being all in on your bet, just like you cannot be married without saying, ‘I am shackling myself to you and I am not going to run away no matter what, so we better get to know each other and get along because this is how it is going to be.’ Without that, you cannot be deeply committed enough to the marriage to make it work. So it seems to me on the forefront of faith, you have to act in the world with courageous trust – not naïve trust, but courageous trust – in the potential goodness of being in order to actually discover whether or not that faith is justified. And that is partly why it is faith; you have to put the cart before the horse. You cannot wait around.”

Jordan Peterson “Mondays of Meaning – March 20th 2023”

In my latest National Post column I describe the weird combination of tedium and fury induced by listening to members of the UN special committee for blaming Israel for all problems in the Mideast droning on.

“Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.”

Henry Ford, cited as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email teaser March 18, 2023