“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself./ And stupid. We should be scared [expletive deleted] of stupid.”
Emailed by a friend as a graphic without further attribution
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the reason for having one day set aside for Thanksgiving is to help us be more grateful every day… and act on it.
“One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.”
John Stuart Mill, quoted in Anthony Robbins, Unlimited Power
“A year earlier, during the third week of April 1940, Lewis had read Christopher Dawson's Beyond Politics. What struck Lewis about the book was the distinction Dawson drew between the ideal of freedom and the ideal of democracy. The idea of democracy as propounded by Rousseau and embodied in the French Revolution placed its emphasis on the ‘general will’ of the community over against the individual. The idea of freedom as expressed by the English placed its emphasis on the rights of the individual over against the will of the whole. Dawson traced modern English notions of freedom to the nonconformists of the 17th century, who sought religious liberty, and to the English aristocracy, which asserted its rights over against the Crown. Dawson concluded that without freedom, modern democracy and modern dictatorship are ‘twin children of the Revolution’ with their emphasis on the community or collective or state. Jack told [his brother] Warnie that he thought this view explained a great deal about the difference between the English and the European democracies. The French offered no exemption from military service for a conscientious objector, but the English did, even if reluctantly. This also explained the political alliance in the 17th and 18th centuries in England between the great nobility and the nonconformist merchant class. It was never the marriage of convenience as some supposed but a marriage of conviction. This view also explained to Jack why he and Warnie he felt so strongly about freedom but less so about democracy. These observations would not have risen to much more than a passing interest, except they became the thesis of C.S. Lewis’s first radio broadcast in May 1941.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
“Stupidity – and I don’t mean ignorance – is a central issue of our time.”
Author William Gaddis, quoted by William F. Buckley, Jr. in National Review February 8, 1999
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Napoleon Bonaparte, widely cited online and apparently authentic (see for instance https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/napoleon-bonaparte-quotes).
“In the second half of A Preface to Paradise Lost, [C.S.] Lewis defended his approach to literary criticism and the artistry of Milton against the recent trend in literary theory represented by I.A. Richards, D.G. James, and T.S. Eliot. His opponents deplored the stock responses to moral questions they found in Paradise Lost. Lewis countered that society would do well to recover Milton's stock responses to pride, treachery, pain, and death.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
“If your mother says she loves you, check it out. That’s what the old cigar-chewing night editors in the city room used to say when I was a cub.”
[My bibliographic note to myself for this one is “Evers MW” but there’s no such entry in my actual bibliographic file for any book I’ve read so I have no idea what it means. The sentiment is in any case widespread regarding old-time journalism.]