“It will be a comfort to me all my life to know that the scientist and the materialist have not the last word: that Darwin and [Herbert] Spencer undermining ancestral beliefs stand themselves on a foundation of sand; of gigantic assumptions and irreconcilable contradictions an inch below the surface”.
C.S. Lewis to “Albert” on accepting an English fellowship and abandoning philosophy with some relief as relentlessly depressing skepticism, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
“Colin O’Scopie, proctologist”
Me Feb. 13, 2024 [invented not a real person].
“Imagine being so intellectually deficient that you convince yourself anyone with a different opinion is corrupt.”
Tony Heller on X Jan. 3 2024 [https://twitter.com/TonyClimate/status/1742668645933949269] somewhat ironically as for all his excellent work on the subject Heller himself insists multiple times a day that climate alarmism is a hoax, very often with the hashtag #ClimateScam
“... the whole way of life to which men are attached and the large ideas to which they own allegiance.”
Walt Rostow (in one of his books but my bibliographic note to self is incomprehensible)
“Martin Amis, who was harshly criticized in America Alone but gave it a positive review, said of the style: ‘Mark Steyn is an oddity: his thoughts and themes are sane and serious – but he writes like a maniac.’”
Wikipedia entry on Mark Steyn [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Steyn] at least as of Feb. 9, 2024
She’s deploring the reflex (when someone fails to say “Thank You” when you hold a door) of feeling “exasperated – but, crucially, not surprised…. ‘Typical!’ you say. As Kate Fox points out, ‘Typical!’ is one of our default modes… The ‘Typical!’ response is actually quite self-flattering, of course. It suggests that fate can never wrong-foot us because we are always prepared for the worst or most unlikely event. ‘So then my sister-in-law had a sex change and went off to live in Krakatoa. Typical!’ we exclaim. ‘So then they started bombing Baghdad. Typical!’ ‘The cat turned out to be a reincarnation of a seventh-century Chinese prophet. Typical!’”
Lynne Truss Talk to the Hand
The notoriously absentminded G.K. Chesterton “frequently forgot to keep appointments and often needed to write an apology to the person he stood up. One time, however, he arrived punctually to see his publisher (to the publisher’s astonishment). But he then handed the man a note containing an explanation of why he couldn’t be there.”
Eric J. Scheske in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 #8 (July/August 2002)
“any religion that does not say that God is hidden is not true, and any religion which does not explain why does not instruct. Ours does both.”
Pascal Pensées