“Growing your own tomatoes is the best way to devote 3 months of your life to saving $2.17”
Emailed by a friend without attribution September 20, 2024
“But what the [Christmas 1914 World War I] truce revealed, by its unofficial and spontaneous nature, was how resilient certain attitudes and values were. Despite the slaughter of the early months, it was the subsequent war that began profoundly to alter those values and to hasten and spread in the west the drift to narcissism and fantasy that had been characteristic of the avant-garde and large segments of the German population before the war.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
In my latest Epoch Times column I say instead of worrying about polls asking whether we think the decline in trust might mysteriously reverse itself, we should concentrate on reversing it by making sure we’re trustworthy. I know it sounds weird but it just might work.
“Be honest, if people heard what you are thinking half of the time, you would either be in jail or a mental hospital.”
Emailed by a friend without attribution Sept. 21, 2024 [he didn't mean me personally in contrast to everyone else, I hasten to add].
“the annoyed feeling which people have on seeing a job being badly done.”
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
“Whenever a moral issue is raised, the reflex of many people is to spout, ‘Who is to say what is right or wrong?’ This is the wrong question. The right question isn’t ‘Who is to say?' but 'How can we find out?’”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” July 1, 2024 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/the-moon-is-made-of-cheese]
“At dinner he [Nero Wolfe] started on automation. He has always been anti-machine, and on automation his position was that it would soon make life an absurdity. It was already bad enough; on a cold and windy March day he was eating his evening meal in comfortable warmth, and he had no personal connection whatever with the production of the warmth. The check that paid the oil bill was connected, but he wasn’t. Soon, with automation, no one would have any connection with the processes and phenomena that make it possible to stay alive. We would all be parasites, living not on some other living organisms but on machines, arrived at the ultimate ignominy. I tried to put up a stiff argument, but he knows more words.”
Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout A Right to Die
“As long as I can look myself in the mirror and know that I am working as hard as I can, doing what I believe is right for the country, that is how I get through, and that is what I believe I am doing.”
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the end of a frenetic and disastrous electoral campaign, quoted in National Post July 4, 2024 [he also said he had a “clear conscience” so the fact that the election was a disaster for him, his party and his nation apparently did nothing to dent the fact that he felt splendid about himself]