Quotes from Around and About

I thought I'd share some of my new (and a few old) favorites:    

  "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem: neat, plausible, and wrong. — H. L. Mencken 

  "To fight and proclaim hope is to actively fight against the death-dealing forces of the world." — Grace Aheron. 

  "He's the sort of man who'd push you in the water rather than have no one to rescue." — Cleggy in Last of the Summer Wine

The Last of the Summer Wine:  Foggy, Cleggy, and Compo

   "There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart, and always to plead it successfully." — Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm.

Illustration of Orley Farm by Millais

   "The power of facing unpleasant facts is clearly an attribute of decent, sane grownups as opposed to the immature, the silly, the nutty, or the doctrinaire. Some exemplary unpleasant facts are these: that life is short and almost always ends messily; that if you live in the actual world you can't have your own way; that if you do get what you want it turns out not to be the thing you wanted; that no one thinks as well of you as you do yourself; and that in one or two generations from now you will be forgotten entirely and the world will go on as if you had never existed." — Paul Fussel, A Power of Facing Unpleasant Facts

    "Life seems so short that people feel they must cram in as much as possible. For me, the most happens when nothing happens. Every day here is indeed a good piece of life. What is the value of a day in which there's no moment to reflect or to be able not to reflect at all? Life changes us little by little into beings who think only by halves, dealing in scraps like rag collectors of thought." — Andrzej Bobkowski, Wartime Notebooks, August 5, 1943 

    "The first thing a principle does – if it really is a principle – is to kill somebody." — Lord Peter Wimsey, in Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers 

    "Once you realize that "deep state" is code for "the rule of law," you can translate their gibberish into something more like English" — David Frum (May 19, 2017)   

    "DARVO is an acronym for "deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender". Some researchers and advocates have characterized it as a common manipulation strategy of psychological abusers. The abuser denies the abuse ever took place, attacks the victim for attempting to hold the abuser accountable, and claims that they, the abuser, are actually the victim in the situation, thus reversing the reality of the victim and offender. This usually involves not just "playing the victim" but also victim blaming."  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO)

    "People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly." ― P.J. O'Rourke 

    "Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities." — G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World 

    "The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work." — G.K. Chesterson, NY Sun 11/3/18 

    "Contrarian arguments are generally contrarian because they're bullshit." — Scott Lemieux

    "If there's anything that a study of history tells us, it's that things can get worse, and also that when people thought they were in end times, they weren't." — Neil Gaiman 

    "He didn't cry: orphan babies learn there's no point in it." — John Irving, Cider House Rules 

    "Don't be afraid of anything. This is our country and it's the only one we have. The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children." — Alexei Navalny, Prison Diaries 

Alexei Navalny in Court

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