“The French expression qui s’excuse s’accuse...”
John O’Sullivan in National Review May 1, 1995
“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.”
W.H. Auden, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail March 7, 2002
“To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.”
George Santayana, as the header quotation on Chapter 64 in George Jonas Beethoven’s Mask
“The symphony in B quiet”
One of mine, from May 1, 2002, regarding aggressively modernist music.
“always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?”
Gabriel Syme in G.K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday
“History is still in the hands of individuals, who by their actions perform God’s miracles.”
James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg The Great Reckoning
“There are no people who are uneducated. There are only a large number of people who receive various forms of a thoroughly bad education. Human intelligence has always received some cultivation, but unfortunately it is often an evil or unwise cultivation.”
G.K. Chesterton in The Bibliophile, November, 1908, quoted in standalone boxed quotations headed “Education” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
In my latest Mercatornet column I say the United States Supreme Court is contributing to the corrosive distrust spreading in their society, and ours as well.