“The secret to each fool, that he’s an ass”
“Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” in Alexander Pope Essay on Man and Other Poems [and yes, a precursor of the Dunning-Kruger effect]
“It taught me to be more sure of myself. The doughnut taught me to realize who I am.”
Ed Atwell, entrepreneur and inventor of the Sunnymoon doughnut, on the merits of entrepreneurship, quoted in Ottawa Citizen June 29, 2006
“God is not a path to fulfillment, He is fulfillment. C.S. Lewis, a devotee of Gilbert’s, was to say that if God was seen as a road, he was not seen at all.”
Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton [summing up the orthodox view in context of the young GKC’s struggles]
“I go slap through a roomful of MSS., criticizing deuced conscientiously, with the result that I post back some years of MSS. to addresses, which I should imagine, must be private asylums.”
G.K. Chesterton writing to E.C. Bentley (the Clerihew guy) in 1895 describing his workday and the various tasks he undertakes for a publishing house, Redway, including clearing a backlog of manuscripts, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton
“The question of what style is going to look like next is always the underlying theme of designers’ new collections. Rarely have there been as few answers to that as during the past few weeks, our fashion critic writes.”
Email from the New York Times October 6, 2024
In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that even governments that talk about fiscal prudence are helpless to stem the tidal wave of overspending because they’re secretly convinced it stimulates the economy.
“Running along both sides of the building’s arcade, a series of verses disparaged the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was only a messenger of God.’ This was not merely to reopen theological debates that Christians had thought settled centuries before, but to condemn the entire New Testament, Gospels and all, as a fabrication. Squabbles among those who had written it, so the Dome of the Rock sternly declared, had polluted the original teachings of Jesus. These, like the revelations granted prophets before him, Abraham, and Moses, and David, had originally been identical to those for claimed by Muhammad. There was only the one true deen, the one true expression of allegiance to God, and that was submission to him: in Arabic, islam. Here was a doctrine with which ‘Muslims’ – those who practice islam – were already well familiar. It was not only to be found emblazoned on buildings. Most of the verses on the Dome of the Rock derived from a series of revelations that Muhammad’s followers believed had been given him by none other than the angel Gabriel. These, assembled after his death to form a single ‘recitation’ or qur’an, constituted for his followers what Jesus represented to Christians: an intrusion into the mortal world, into the sublunar, into the diurnal, of the divine.... This gave its pronouncement on Christians, as on everything else, an awful and irrevocable force.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“Once you grasp >95% of MPs are NPCs…”
Dominic Cummings on X Dec. 19, 2024 [https://x.com/Dominic2306/status/1869756643208286355] [specifically re the British Parliament].