“It is quite easy to give people a second nature, if you catch them early enough. There is no belief, however grotesque and even villainous, that cannot be made a part of human nature if it is inculcated in childhood and not contradicted in the child’s hearing.”
George Bernard Shaw Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism (he cites foot-binding, ritual suicide when the king dies and suttee).
In my latest National Post column I say don’t confuse malevolent stupidity with conspiracy.
“We try to make virtues out of the faults we have no wish to correct.”
Francois, duc de La Rouchefoucauld, quoted on https://www.hound-dog-media.com
“there is no real shame in retreating from an impossible situation or in fleeing from an enemy that seems too powerful to attack.”
Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s.
"Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are your fears."
Rudyard Kipling, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com
“family: the thing on which all civilization is built; the idea that a man and a woman should live largely for the next generation and that they should, to some extent, defer their personal amusements, such as divorce and dissipation, for the benefit of the next generation.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 22, 1911, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #5 (March 2003)
“After the gleam of exaggerated hopes, what Kipling called the Gods of the Copybook Headings have come back to croak out their ancient saws, whose only merit is that they happen to be true.”
The Economist December 22, 1990