“‘The history of the world is but the biography of great men,’ wrote Carlisle in 1841. ‘There is properly no history,’ echoed Emerson that same year, ‘only biography.’”
The Beaver February-March 1998
“Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”
The Duke of Wellington according to AZ Quotes [https://www.azquotes.com/author/15482-Duke_of_Wellington]
In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that trust is decaying fast in our society, because trustworthiness is succumbing to self-actualization, with dangerous consequences from politics to concerts.
“Those who fail in life are however very apt to assume a tone of injured innocence, and conclude too hastily that everybody excepting themselves has had a hand in their personal misfortunes…. Dr. Johnson, who came up to London with a single guinea in his pocket, and who once accurately described himself in his signature to a letter addressed to a noble lord, as IMPRANSUS, or Dinnerless, has honestly said, ‘All the complaints which are made of the world are unjust; I never knew a man of merit neglected; it was generally by his own fault that he failed of success.’”
Samuel Smiles Self-Help
“It was big. It tried to have a go at my feet. I threw my diving belt. He came back and bit my diving belt and then he let go. After that he came back one more time.”
Swedish diver Helena Nevalainen, who along with four others fought off Komodo dragons while stranded on a remote Indonesian island for more than a day, quoted in National Post June 9, 2008.
“No Catholic thinks he is a good Catholic; or he would by that thought become a bad Catholic. I for one am not even tempted to any illusion in that matter; I fear that very often, when I have got up early to go to Mass, I have said with a groan, Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, which, I may explain to the Moslem, is not a quotation from the Mass. But the critic here in question does not say, in the grand Lucretian manner, ‘Religion alone can persuade men to such evils.’”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly August 24, 1933, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“I married my wife for her looks – but not the ones she’s giving me lately.”
Image on a T-shirt emailed by a friend February 11, 2023.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I ask how people can continue to believe in the competence, wisdom and compassion of government when they have daily evidence of its inept and callous folly.