“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
“The wise, I say, may take advice from fools.”
Pandar to Troilus in Geoffrey Chaucer Troilus and Criseyde
“the way that Bear Bryant looked upon football players - ‘Be good or be gone.’”
An author whose name I did not record in National Review April 12, 1993
“Chicago’s going to want to pour on all the throttles here.”
Play-by-play announcer on ESPN February 1987
“Romance lurks in unexpected places. We walk abroad amidst scenes made dull by familiarity, and let our thoughts ramble far away beyond the commonplace… and behold! all the time Romance is at our very doors.”
The narrator in R. Austin Freeman, “The Dead Hand,” in Douglas G. Greene, ed., Detection by Gaslight: 14 Victorian Detective Stories (the reference is to adventure and wonder not love specifically).
In my latest Convivium article I say the people playing at holding a Black Mass in Ottawa weren’t serious… which is.
“Marge: Sweetie, you could still go to McGill. The Harvard of Canada./ Lisa: Anything that's the Something of the Something isn't really the Anything of Anything”
The Simpsons “MoneyBART” episode, according to www.simpsonseh.com, a website about the Simpsons and Canada (the setup is that Lisa is worried that she’s not doing enough extracurricular stuff to get into an Ivy League university).
“You’ve been spending too much time with him lately.”
Comment by one colleague about another in March 2002 that prompted this addition to my "That doesn't narrow the field much" file of insults (the title inspired by one of the greatest putdowns in movie history, from Clint Eastwood's character in The Eiger Sanction)