“Did he make it?” “No... but he might have.”
An exchange between war correspondent Dick Ennis (Robert Mitchum) and Cpl. Jack Rabinoff (Peter Falk) in the movie Anzio about a guy who’d shown Ennis a technique for trying to get through a minefield years earlier in China (specifically by throwing large rocks to make a path and stepping on them if they hadn’t exploded)
“We don’t believe in a God any more/ Any more than in fairies or elves,/ Roll ova Jehova we don’ need a prime mova/ We only believe in Ourselves.”
Part of a poem “The Scientist’s Lament” by John Seymour quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts
“her photo on the dust jacket shows a face that, as H.L. Mencken said, makes you want to burn every bed in America.”
An author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine September 1991 re an author who I shall not name
In my latest Loonie Politics column I lament that far too many voters still believe politicians can shower them with free money and not germinating a nasty crop of debt and inflation instead of wealth and social services.
“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
In my latest National Post column I summon the shade of former U.S. President and master of Realpolitik Richard M. Nixon to discuss the ominous parallel implications of the collapse of the Afghan and Vietnamese missions for Western credibility in the world.
“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)