“The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is – what it was intended to do, and how it is meant to be used. After that has been discovered, the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about the cathedral. But such questions come later. The first thing to understand first thing is to understand the object before you: as long as you think the corkscrew is meant for opening tins or the cathedral for entertaining tourists you can say nothing to the purpose about them. The first thing the reader needs to know about Paradise Lost is what Milton meant it to be.”

The opening paragraph of A Preface to Paradise Lost by C.S. Lewis, quoted in Harry Lee Poe, The Making of C.S. Lewis [and how relevant to reactions by proudly atheist French politicians when Notre Dame de Paris caught fire].

“Scholars have spread much darkness” “soon we shall know nothing at all”

Mark Twain, quoted by Nicholas Davidson in Chronicles magazine September 1988 [and it can be found elsewhere online but nobody seems to know what connected the two halves and no one offers a more detailed source; so if he did not say it, and maybe he did not, he missed a good chance].

In my latest Epoch Times column I said the scariest thing about the current debate over social programs is that there isn’t one. We tried 30 years ago, realized it was hard, gave up and spent our way to economic and social ruin.

“Literature is not supposed to be God Almighty summing up at the end of the world. It is supposed to be somebody telling a story about somebody else.”

G.K. Chesterton “Report of a speech, Glasgow Herald, Feb. 7, 1910”, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)

“Assassination, said Disraeli, never changed the history of the world.”

An article in The Economist May 25, 1991 [it added that while it might be true, that of Rajiv Gandhi might prove an exception, which was a remarkable example of present-fixated narrow-mindedness since that of Lincoln and of Julius Caesar arguably did whereas his certainly did not].

“Power is always dangerous. It attracts the worst and corrupts the best.”

Ragnar Lothbrok, quoted in an email from a friend, and it turns out to be from a TV series called Vikings, in 2015 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3623674/characters/nm1379938).

“To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t.”

Primo Levi, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail Feb. 25, 2004

“Not to decide is to decide.”

Harvey Cox, quoted in J.W. Marriott Jr. and Kathi Ann Brown, The Spirit to Serve: Marriott’s Way.