“It’s all fun and games until somebody loses a soul.”
One of mine from Nov. 3, 2023 [inspired by a news story about the trendiness of Satanism in popular culture].
“It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted without further details in “News With Views” “Compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“Antisemitism is both a sort of mental impairment and a barrier to learning. If you think that ‘the Jews’ control the banks, you don’t understand finance, and will never understand it because you have this happy conspiracy theory and you think you already know everything. If you think ‘the Jews’ control the weather with their space lasers, you’re not going to bother to study meteorological science. A society in which this kind of antisemitism is prevalent is not going to be a sign of a society on the cutting edge of science or business or economics or anything else. In our society, these beliefs are toxic. They’re terrible for Jews, but they are actually poison to what makes America, America.”
Walter Russell Mead in conversation with Bari Weiss on The Free Press October 31, 2023 [https://www.thefp.com/p/are-we-tipping-into-world-war-three].
“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