“there is even a rather delightful publication for children called The Punctuation Repair Kit, which takes the line ‘Hey! It’s uncool to be stupid!’ – which is a lie, of course, but you have to admire them for trying.”
Lynn Truss Eats, Shoots & Leaves
“One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happened to be right, so much the better...”
Larry Niven Ringworld [according to my notes, which fail to explain why I ever read this thing, “he” was a character named Louis Wu]
“My dear friend, the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, was once accosted by a lady who complained that the synagogue service did not say what she meant. ‘Madam,’ said Heschel, ‘the idea is not that the service should say what we mean but that we should mean what the service says.’”
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in response to a letter in First Things August-September 2004
“There are no stupid questions… but if there were…”
Another of mine, from Nov. 3 2014 [probably I was about to ask one that strove to qualify].
In my latest Mercatornet column I say the election of Donald Trump has certainly had a depressing effect on the giant climate gabfest in Baku but far more as symptom than as cause.
“But leadership, no matter whether you are a midshipman or an admiral, is never easy. Even those who seemed carry the burden of leadership with ease often struggle. Carl von Clausewitz, the great nineteenth-century general who wrote the consummate book On War, once said that ‘everything in war is simple, but the simple things are difficult.’”
Author’s “Introduction” to William H. McRaven The Wisdom of the Bullfrog
“The character of the process by which the views of the intellectuals influence the politics of tomorrow is therefore of much more than academic interest. Whether we merely wish to foresee or attempt to influence the course of events, it is a factor of much greater importance than is generally understood. What to the contemporary observer appears as the battle of conflicting interests has indeed often been decided long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow circles. Paradoxically enough, however, in general only the parties of the Left have done most to spread the belief that it was the numerical strength of the opposing material interests which decided political issues, whereas in practice these same parties have regularly and successfully acted as if they understood the key position of the intellectuals. Whether by design or driven by the force of circumstances, they have always directed their main effort toward gaining the support of this ‘elite,’ while the more conservative groups have acted, as regularly but unsuccessfully, on a more naive view of mass democracy and have usually vainly tried directly to reach and to persuade the individual voter.”
Friedrich Hayek “The Intellectuals and Socialism”
“In today’s broken world, especially with its broken education system, which is part of the reason for the broken world, nothing very great is being achieved. In fact, nearly nothing at all is being achieved when students can’t even achieve basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, much less studying great works of literature and philosophy, and learning the art of reason. The lack of achievement is because students are not being taught to focus on a truth that is outside of themselves. They’re being taught to focus on themselves – on their identity, on their rights and their entitlements, and are not taught anything to benefit their unformed and unfilled minds. In the meantime, they have a hunger for truth and goodness and beauty, and it is completely unsatisfied in a system that is designed to starve them of these things. As a result, they are left angry and depressed, but also inarticulate – because they have not been taught to be articulate – so they cannot even express their frustration. And they collapse into their lonely inner world.”
David Warren in Ottawa Citizen Nov. 29, 2006