“Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.”
Bertrand Russell, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail April 16, 2007.
“You don’t hit off tackle in baseball, and you can’t play the game with your teeth gritted.”
Ray Miller, Baltimore Orioles pitching coach, quoted in Thomas Boswell How Life Imitates the World Series
“More things are missed because they are too big to be seen than because they are too small to be seen.”
G.K. Chesterton in America August 30, 1930, quoted in “Chesterton For Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“To [British novelist Graham] Swift, history is not an abstract force but, as he puts it, the story ‘of how little people lived through big things.’”
A writer whose name I did not record in Maclean’s May 6, 1996
Gen. George “McLellan – briefly and reluctantly restored to command – fought the Battle of Antietam (called Sharpsburg in the South) just well enough to stop Lee and his invading army. McLellan was fatally afflicted, however, with what Lincoln in a cutting phrase called a case of ‘the slows’…”
Tom Wicker in Robert Cowley, ed. What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been
“Thou Shalt not kill the Ball”
Title of a section in Joe Torre contribution to Nolan Ryan and Joe Torre with Joel Cohen, Pitching and Hitting.
“It can hardly be proposed that they [humans] should learn a purer religion from the Aztecs or sit at the feet of the Incas of Peru. All the rest of the world was a welter of barbarism. It is essential to recognise that the Roman Empire was recognised as the highest achievement of the human race; and also as the broadest. A dreadful secret seemed to be written as in obscure hieroglyphics across those mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal amphitheatres and aqueducts. Man could do no more. For it was not the message blazed on the Babylonian wall, that one king was found wanting or his one kingdom given to a stranger. It was no such good news as the news of invasion and conquest. There was nothing left that could conquer Rome; but there was also nothing left that could improve it. It was the strongest thing that was growing weak. It was the best thing that was going to the bad.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Strangest Story in the World” in The Everlasting Man quoted in “The Book of the Prophet Daniel” in “GKC on Scripture * Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
In a talk to the Augustine College Summer Seminar I argued that the American Revolution brought liberty and prosperity because it looked back to the solid foundations of Magna Carta, Christianity and the Western tradition, while the French Revolution brought misery and death because it looked forward to a utopian future unconstrained by the past.