“The simple truth would still cause a considerable sensation. It is the one shock for which the world is still waiting.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness January 6, 1923, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2022)
“Quit while you’re behind.”
Another of mine, from August 6, 2004, inspired by entering the quotation that was published on August 1 2023.
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask politicians, activists and citizens to think of something, anything, that governments in Canada should just stop doing, or trying to, because it’s not a legitimate state function or because they’re too overloaded just now to tackle that thing as well. If nobody can thing of even one, I don’t just know we have a problem, I know what it is.
“With his absolute faith in his own baseball eye, and his coaches’ ability to polish skills, [Earl] Weaver manages as though victory were an inevitability.”
Thomas Boswell How Life Imitates The World Series
Dolly “Parton writes songs, which is one artistic expression of storytelling — poetry adorned by the mathematics of music.... Preachers tell stories, too; stories about truths that change history. We preach the Word, and ‘in the beginning the Word and the Word was God.’ God is the first storyteller, and the angels the first song-tellers. A story endures to the extent that it conveys an enduring truth. That’s why so many songs are about love — desired, despairing, requited, unrequited, honoured, betrayed. Love is what most endures. The Jews taught the world about stories that make present now what God wrote in history, which is why their greatest collection of stories opens with ‘In the beginning.’ ‘Once upon a time’ is the usual way to do it, but doesn’t fit when time has not yet been created.”
Fr. Raymond J. de Souza in National Post December 24, 2022
“Count me out. I’d rather die. Why, those vampires would suck me dry. They’d scrape the tan right off my face.”
Pheidippides resisting his father Strepsiades’ advice to study at Sokrates’ Thinkery so he can learn to cheat Strepsiades’ creditors, in Aristophanes The Clouds (translation by William Arrowsmith)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I ask for discretion and charity while insisting that the character of those who would rule over us is a matter of key public importance.
“‘Life is short, so I shall eat butter,’ is India’s counterpart to ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’”
My source for this one is “H. Smith WRM” but what it means I do not know; I failed to record it in my Bibliography file. Possibly it’s a misprint for Hyrum W. Smith’s What Matters Most.