“The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.”
President George W. Bush in his address to the nation on the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, quoted in OpinionJournal February 1 2003
“Invited to choose between two bad poets, Dr. Johnson said he declined to adjudicate the precedence between a louse and a flea.”
Mark Steyn in National Post June 28, 2001
“It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace. Birth is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering and monstrous prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen to everybody, can stop one’s heart with the very thought of them.”
G.K. Chesterton What’s Wrong with the World
“when we scrape away the varnish of wealth, education, class, ethnic origin, parochial loyalties, we discover that however much we’ve changed the shape of man’s physical environment, man himself is still sinful, vain, greedy, ambitious, lustful, self-centered, unrepentant, and requiring of restraint.”
Barry Goldwater With No Apologies (though elsewhere in the book even he said new technologies and ideas might make the world way better in the 21st century)
“it is not the creation of wealth that is wrong but love of money for its own sake. The spiritual dimension comes in deciding what one does with the wealth.”
Margaret Thatcher to the Church of Scotland in Fr. James Vincent Schall Religion, Wealth and Poverty
In my latest National Post column I quote two ponderously preposterous assurances on the pandemic a year ago to ask why no experience of their own failure ever convinces Canadian authorities to speak more humbly or think more carefully.
“The failure of modern culture lies not in its principle of individualism, not in the idea that moral virtue is the same as the pursuit of self-interest, but in the deterioration of the meaning of self-interest; not in the fact that people are too much concerned with their self-interest, but that they are not concerned enough with the interest of their real self; not in the fact that they are too selfish, but that they do not love themselves.”
Erich Fromm Man for Himself
“When you have nothing important or interesting to say, don’t let anyone persuade you to say it.”
H. Jackson Brown Jr. quoted on BrainyQuote (www.brainyquote.com/quotes/h_jackson_brown_jr_386408)