“Working hard at something that doesn’t work doesn’t make it work.”
John Alston on PBS June 21, 1992
“There’s just gotta be a place up ahead where men ain’t low-down and poker’s played fair. If there weren’t, what are all the songs about? I’ll see y’all there and we can sing together, and shake our heads over all the meanness in the Used-To-Be.”
The last words of Buster Scruggs as he approaches heaven with his harp and the duet fades out, in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
“the decade that taste forgot”
Regarding the 1970s, and attributed to “one journalist” by David P. Deavel in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22) (in a piece saying the late Fr. James V. Schall “never succumbed to the 1970s habit too many of his Jesuit confreres had of wearing the intellectual and spiritual (not to mention sartorial) clothing of that decade”.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Justin Trudeau’s totally out-of-touch aristocratic remarks about borrowing via credit cards may finally bring him down politically.
“The next revolution is always perfect.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly Vol. 8 (September, 1928 – March, 1929) quoted in “Chesterton University An Introduction to the Writings of G.K. Chesterton by Dale Ahlquist” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22)
“The best prophet of the future is the past.”
Lord Byron (whose advice I only take cautiously and in small amounts, to be sure), apparently in a letter written January 28, 1828 though my efforts to track it down did not lead to a confirmed specific attribution.
Claiming a special French “right to idleness”, radical eco-feminist Green MP Sandrine Rousseau said hard work was “essentially a Right-wing value”.
The Telegraph November 14, 2022 [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/14/french-have-got-even-lazier-study-shows-vast-majority-happy/]; I trust she did not overstrain herself writing that admission disguised as a boast.
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask how it is possible that as the Canadian federal public service swells up like a dirigible, it can’t find someone to process expense claims from soldiers we sent to Poland then told to buy their own meals.