“A dreadful rumour as to an engagement which had been one of its [some party’s] accursed fruits tormented me with the fresh certainty that I had not been missed, and bred in me that most desolating brand of cynicism which is produced by defeat through insignificance.”
Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands
“An eagle hunts no flies.”
A Saxon proverb over the desk of Col. Hans Oster, head of Department Z (HQ and central registry) of the Abwehr and an important member of the Schwarze Kapelle according to Anthony Cave Brown, Bodyguard of Lies: The Exraordinary, True Story of the Clandestine War of Deception that Hid the Secrets of D-Day from Hitler and Sealed the Allied Victory [he calls Oster “A Saxon horse gunner who was at once elegant and arrogant” and says he was openly contemptuous of Hitler and the Nazis.
“and if there be some harder, better way to salvation than to follow that which we believe to be good, then we are all damned.”
Lord Dunsany, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley
“Isn’t it unnerving that the person investing your money is called a ‘broker’?”
Van Allen Turner of the Upstream Restaurant and Richard Cilles of the Kingston Brewing Company according to Steve Madely in Ottawa Sun March 2, 1999
“If truth is relative, to what is it relative?”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News June 2, 1906, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“The history of mankind is the history of ideas.”
Ludwig von Mises Planned Chaos [1st sentence of “The Liberation of the Demons”]
“The whole conscious and subconscious trend of modernism is the distrust, and even the detestation, of the ordinary man.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness March 9, 1916, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“Why, unhappy man, do you thus take pains to exonerate fortune of your heaviest charge against her, by conduct that will make it seem that you are not unjustly in calamity, and that it is not your present condition, but your former happiness, that was more than your deserts? And why depreciate also my victory, and make my conquests insignificant, by proving yourself a coward, and a foe beneath a Roman?”
Aemilius Paulus to Perseus when the latter abased himself in defeat, according to Plutarch’s Lives I