“Of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is the man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”
G.K. Chesterton in Tremendous Trifles
“The moral state of mankind fills me with dismays and horrors.”
Edmund Burke, expressly re his own time, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind
“It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978 (www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978)
“I’ve lived a long life and seen a lot of hard times… most of which never happened.”
“Mark Twain Quotables” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #8 (Issue 57, July-August 2004)
“Is there a possibility that the government of nations may fall into the hands of men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies, and that this all is without a father?”
John Quincy Adams, in the Letters of Publicola, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind [Kirk added that the specific target was Thomas Paine and that Adams went on that rather than such an outcome “Give us again the gods of the Greeks.”]
“The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News in 1906
Regarding the new French Minister “whom you have commended as a ‘sensible and honest man;’ these are qualities too rare and too precious not to merit one’s particular esteem.”
George Washington to the Marquis de Lafayette Feb. 7 1788, in W.B. Allen, ed. George Washington: A Collection
“I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.”
Edmund Burke, about Marie Antoinette, quoted by Christopher Hitchens reviewing Frank M. Turner’s edition of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in The Atlantic Monthly April 2004 (how’s that for a convoluted source?)