“it was Fran Lebowitz, I think, who said that God created Los Angeles so insomniacs in New York would have a place to call in the middle of the night.”
A writer whose name I did not record in The New Republic Oct. 7, 1991
“There are a great many truths that we can’t help knowing at some level. Even so, we may not be aware of knowing them, we can deny knowing them, and we can pretend to ourselves that we don’t know them.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]
“Commentators on the political scene tend in retrospect to regard the figures who emerge into prominence as totally derisory. Understandably so. It is extremely difficult, as I know from personal experience, to spend time with one or other of them without reaching the conclusion that some accomplished clown like Peter Sellers has substituted for him.”
Malcolm Muggeridge in 1972 in Chronicles of Wasted Time, in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge
“If the eighteenth century claimed to be the Age of Reason, nobody can deny the claim of the twentieth century to be the Age of Unreason.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly, Nov. 1, 1930, as header quotation on Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
In my latest Epoch Times column I complain that Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford subsidizing EV manufacturing in Canada are repeating very old economic mistakes in an unaffordable fog of smug ignorance.
“They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.”
“Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), English author” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail Dec. 17, 2010
“One of them [a crook planning to rob a Vegas casino in the Donald Westlake novel What’s The Worst Thing That Could Happen?] says he has a lot of ideas, but Westlake writes: ‘A whole lot of ideas isn’t a plan.… Ideas without a plan is usually just enough boulders to get you into the deep part of the stream, and no way to get back.’”
George F. Will in National Post Dec. 5, 2001 [not clear if it’s his elision or Westlake’s]
“We like to ask ‘If there is a God, why is there any evil?’ Here is a better question: If there isn’t a God, why is there any good?”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]