“Most of us can keep a secret. It’s the people we tell it to who can’t.”
In The Buzzer (published by BC Transit) Jan. 14, 1994, not attributed.
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask that Santa Claus bring me a functioning Canadian military up north, and everywhere, because my government certainly doesn’t seem likely to provide one.
“as difficult as leadership is, it is not complicated. In its simplest form, leadership is ‘accomplishing a task with the people and resources you have while maintaining the integrity of your institution.’”
Author’s “Introduction” to William H. McRaven The Wisdom of the Bullfrog
“History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.”
E. H. Carr, What Is History?
“IF I WERE ASKED why I think our whole industrial society is cursed with sterility and stamped with the mark of the slave, I could give a great many answers, but one will serve for the moment: because it cannot create a custom. It can only create a fashion. Now a fashion is simply something that has failed to be a custom. It is changed as a fashion because it is a failure as a custom. The rich, who are the most restless of mankind, do one thing after another, and prove in the very process that they cannot create anything that is good enough to last. Their succession of fashions is in itself a succession of failures. For when men have made really dignified and humane things they have always desired that they should remain; or, at least, that some relic of them should remain. We have statues of all schools of statuary and buildings of all periods of architecture. But fashion, in the feverish sense that exists to-day, is a totally different thing, a merely destructive thing; indeed, an entirely negative thing. It is as if a man were perpetually carving a statue and smashing it as soon as he carved it; as if he were always clumsily fumbling with the clay and had never modelled it to his liking. It is as if people began to dig up the foundations of a house before they had finished putting the roof on... ”
G.K. Chesterton “Poetry in Action” reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022) p. 6 [including start]
“Stupid kills”
Another of mine, from June 2003
“There is, you know, such a thing as being too intellectual in your approach to a problem. He [Truman] believed that even a wrong decision was better than no decision at all.”
Clark Clifford, quoted in an article in The Economist August 1, 1992 [if it had a byline I did not record it; it was evidently something Clifford “then a bright young man” said later than his time in that administration].
“‘There is no nation so atheistic that it does not attribute a sanctity to two gods, the dead man and the woman in travail.’”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Fr. James V. Schall. S.J. in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #1 (Sept. 04) [apparently originally in “The Mystery of Patriotism” in The Commonwealth Jan. 19, 1902]