“Paranoia: It could be sneaking up on you!”
Another of my own would-be witticisms, from January 2nd 1999.
“the bullion is not worth the dive”
Rex Murphy in Globe & Mail July 15, 2000 (specifically regarding not bothering to decipher most rap lyrics).
“Search for the perfect church if you will; when you find it, join it, and realize that on that day it becomes something less than perfect.”
Fr. Andrew Greeley quoted by William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review Sept. 15, 1997
Praises tobacco that “does not make me wish my mouth was in a different country the next day.”
Morton Flayer in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #3 (December 1999)
“I have been through the depths of poverty and sickness. When people ask me what has kept me going through the troubles that come to all of us, I always reply: ‘I stood yesterday. I can stand today. And I will not permit myself to think about what might happen tomorrow.’ I have known want and struggle and anxiety and despair. I have always had to work beyond the limit of my strength. As I look back upon my life, I see it as a battlefield strewn with the wrecks of dead dreams and broken hopes and shattered illusions – a battle in which I always fought with the odds tremendously against me, and which has left me scarred and bruised and maimed and old before my time. Yet I have no pity for myself; no tears to shed over the past and gone sorrows; no envy for the women who have been spared all I have gone through. For I have lived. They only existed. I have drunk the cup of life down to its very dregs. They have only sipped the bubbles on top of it. I know things they will never know. I see things to which they are blind. It is only the women whose eyes have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision that makes them little sisters to all the world. I have learned in the great University of Hard Knocks a philosophy that no woman who has had an easy life ever acquires. I have learned to live each day as it comes and not to borrow trouble by dreading the morrow.”
“’I Stood Yesterday. I Can Stand Today’ by Dorothea Dix in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
In my latest National Post column, I warn that reflexively scoffing at the rubes who don’t like sending their money to Quebec and think they can stop it would be disastrous.
“‘History, Paul Valery once wrote, ‘is the science of what never happens twice...’“
George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs
“No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.”
Dr. Johnson, quoted in Chronicles magazine August 1991