“The two most abundant things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.”
Harlan Ellison, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail May 8, 2001
“‘Tis a lesson you should heed,/ Try, try again;/ If at first you don’t succeed,/ Try, try again; Then your courage should appear,/ For, if you will persevere,/ You will conquer, never fear;/ Try, try again.”
Unsourced, complete, in William Bennett The Book of Virtues
“There are some people who would hardly accept any direct happiness, unless you sprang it on them as a surprise.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted without further attribution as header quotation on John Walker “Banishing Trolls” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)
“The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.”
British jurist Sir George Jessel, quoted by Katherine Gay in I think the Financial Post from early 1994 (given me by a colleague without precise attribution)
“In 100 years, we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.”
Joe Sobran quoted “In the last issue of Gilbert” by David Deavel, according to Pamela Patnode “The Art of Language” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023); she added “The observation rings true today, and it has scriptural significance.”
“Ideas and values, not location or weather, were what distinguished the Greeks.”
Victor Davis Hanson The Wars of the Ancient Greeks
“the type of modern idealism is a very narrow type. As Stevenson said, modern civilisation is ‘a dingy, ungentlemanly business. It leaves so much out of a man.’ In the old romances it was the villain that was monotonous. In the old melodramas it was the villain who always looked the same. His black moustache, eyeglass, and cigarette, were a sort of uniform of the infernal service. But the good men were of all conceivable shapes and colours – and some rather inconceivable. Don Quixote was a good man, and starved himself; Mr. Pickwick was a good man, and did not object to milk punch; Sam Weller was a good man, and did not object to pretty housemaids; the Master of Ravenswood was a good man and got drowned; Sidney Carton was a good man and got drunk; Benedick is a good man in Much Ado About Nothing; and so is the Friar in Romeo and Juliet. The old masters maintain the gayest miscellaneousness in good men by having one black stick to represent bad men. It was like the patches that their ladies put upon their complexions. That one black spot threw up and set free all the changing colours and contours of real health. But to-day we are drifting to the opposite extreme. We are getting only one kind of good man – one who approves of international peace, one who is quite in favour of social reform, one who thinks there should be a minimum wage, but also a court of arbitration – enough, you know him. And we have got around us, on the other hand, every antic and extravagance of the evil man; varieties which none of the old romancers could have conceived, or would have been permitted to describe. I confess I prefer the old-time notice-boards warning men off particular precipices and swamps in what is in other respects a rolling and romantic land of liberty.”
G.K. Chesterton in The Eye Witness March 7, 1912 reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)
In my latest Epoch Times column I mocked progressive alarm at Jordan Peterson daring to interview Pierre Poilievre, and at either man daring to exist. But I then expressed my own alarm at the way Poilievre makes plausibly right-wing noises without articulating genuine policy alternatives on major issues.