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My Small Boat

Man please thy maker and be merry set not for this world a cherry.

Category: Uncategorized

H L Menken

Posted on December 30, 2022December 30, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on H L Menken

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.

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John Steinbeck

Posted on October 29, 2022October 29, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on John Steinbeck

…and now that you don’t have to be perfect,
you can be good.

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Martin Luther

Posted on October 25, 2022October 25, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on Martin Luther

Nothing is forgotten slower than an insult and nothing faster than a good deed.

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A A Milne

Posted on October 19, 2022October 19, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on A A Milne

Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.

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C S Lewis

Posted on October 18, 2022October 19, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on C S Lewis

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmán, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.

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G K Chesterton

Posted on September 26, 2022September 26, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on G K Chesterton

We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.

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Winston Churchill

Posted on June 19, 2022June 18, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on Winston Churchill

We are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance. We have engrossed to ourselves, in a time when other powerful nations were paralysed by barbarism or internal war, an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.

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A.E. Housman

Posted on June 18, 2022June 18, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on A.E. Housman

Three minutes’ thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

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Jon Stewart

Posted on June 17, 2022June 17, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on Jon Stewart

It’s like when people say Bob Dylan changed the world in the ’60s. He wrote some good tunes, and some people who did actually end up changing the world probably hummed them a lot, but that’s not what changed the world.

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Lin Yutang

Posted on June 17, 2022June 17, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on Lin Yutang

When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set. 

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John Milton

Posted on May 28, 2022May 27, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on John Milton

They who have put out
the peoples’ eyes
reproach them
of their blindnesse

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John Alexander Smith

Posted on May 27, 2022May 27, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on John Alexander Smith

Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in life, save only this: if you work hard and diligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot; and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.

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Percy Fitzpatrick

Posted on May 9, 2022May 9, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on Percy Fitzpatrick

At the end of a week of failures and disappointment all I knew was that I knew nothing – a very notable advance it is true, but one quite difficult to appreciate.

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Jeff Pearce

Posted on May 7, 2022May 7, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on Jeff Pearce

The West will begin to understand Africa when it realizes it’s not talking to a child – it’s talking to its mother.

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Winston Churchill

Posted on April 26, 2022April 26, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on Winston Churchill

We are the masters of the unsaid words, but the slaves of those we let slip out.

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John Rieke

Posted on April 20, 2022April 20, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on John Rieke

Cities are not loud. Cars are loud

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Sun Tzu

Posted on April 19, 2022April 18, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on Sun Tzu

Therefore, the best warfare strategy is to attack the enemy’s plans, next is to attack alliances, next is to attack the army, and the worst is to attack a walled city.

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Barry Caplan

Posted on April 17, 2022April 17, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on Barry Caplan

If you want to combat error, critique your in-group. You speak their language and they trust you, so you might persuade someone. If you want to raise your status, critique your out-group. They won’t listen, but your in-group will love it.

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Posted on March 26, 2022March 26, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.

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Czeslaw Milosz

Posted on March 11, 2022March 11, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on Czeslaw Milosz

What is pronounced strengthens itself.
What is not pronounced tends to nonexistence

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General Norman Schwarzkopf

Posted on March 6, 2022March 6, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on General Norman Schwarzkopf

Captains think tactics, generals think trucks.

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Ernest Hemingway

Posted on February 12, 2022February 12, 2022 By Crispin No Comments on Ernest Hemingway

Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.

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Hannah Arendt

Posted on December 31, 2021December 31, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Hannah Arendt

Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.

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John Milton

Posted on December 30, 2021December 30, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on John Milton

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

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Roy Jenkins

Posted on December 27, 2021December 27, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Roy Jenkins

Never worry about criticism from people you wouldn’t dream of taking advice from.

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Rowan Williams

Posted on December 26, 2021December 26, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Rowan Williams

When I think of people in my own life that I call holy, who have really made an impact…[these] people have made me feel better rather than worse about myself. Or rather, not quite that: these are never people who make me feel complacent about myself, far from it; they make me feel that there is hope for my confused and compromised humanity…somehow, I feel a little bit more myself…I have a theory, which I started elaborating after I had met Archbishop Desmond Tutu a few times, that there are two kinds of egotists in this world. There are egotists that are so in love with themselves that they have no room for anybody else, and there are egotists that are so in love with themselves that they make it possible for everybody else to be in love with themselves…And in that sense Desmond Tutu manifestly loves being Desmond Tutu; there’s no doubt about that. But the effect of that is not to make me feel frozen or shrunk; it makes me feel that just possibly, by God’s infinite grace, I could one day love being Rowan Williams in the way that Desmond Tutu loves being Desmond Tutu.

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Sir Roger Scruton

Posted on December 12, 2021December 13, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Sir Roger Scruton

Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.

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Tom Holland

Posted on December 12, 2021December 12, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Tom Holland

 History isn’t about you; that’s what makes it history. It’s about somebody else, living in an entirely different moral and intellectual world. It’s a drama in which you’re not present, reminding you of your own tiny, humble place in the cosmic order. It’s not relevant. That’s why it’s so important.

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 I A Richards

Posted on December 11, 2021December 13, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on  I A Richards

 All thinking from the lowest to the highest – whatever else it may be – is sorting.

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Freeman Dyson

Posted on December 5, 2021December 13, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Freeman Dyson

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

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Ricky Gervais

Posted on December 5, 2021December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Ricky Gervais

Be the person your dog thinks you are.

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G K Chesterton

Posted on November 21, 2021December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on G K Chesterton

Abandon hopelessness all ye who enter here.

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Friedrich W. Nietzsche

Posted on November 6, 2021December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Friedrich W. Nietzsche

Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.

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Alfred North Whitehead

Posted on October 26, 2021December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Alfred North Whitehead

To have seen it from one side only is not to have seen it. […] There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

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Charles De Gaulle

Posted on October 13, 2021December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Charles De Gaulle

Treaties are like roses and maidens: they last as long as they last.

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Rudyard Kipling

Posted on October 6, 2021October 13, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Rudyard Kipling

THE Camel’s hump is an ugly lump
Which well you may see at the Zoo;
But uglier yet is the hump we get
From having too little to do.

Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo,
If we haven’t enough to do-oo-oo,
We get the hump—
Cameelious hump—
The hump that is black and blue!

We climb out of bed with a frouzly head,
And a snarly-yarly voice.
We shiver and scowl and we grunt and we growl
At our bath and our boots and our toys;

And there ought to be a corner for me
(And I know’ there is one for you)
When we get the hump—
Cameelious hump—
The hump that is black and blue!

The cure for this ill is not to sit still,
Or frowst with a book by the fire;
But to take a large hoe and a shovel also,
And dig till you gently perspire;

And then you will find that the sun and the wind,
And the Djinn of the Garden too,
Have lifted the hump—
The horrible hump—
The hump that is black and blue!

I get it as well as you-oo-oo
If I haven’t enough to do-oo-oo!
We all get hump—
Cameelious hump—
Kiddies and grown-ups too!

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John Stuart Mill

Posted on September 18, 2021December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on John Stuart Mill

I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

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Isaac Asimov

Posted on September 15, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Isaac Asimov

Education isn’t something you can finish.

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G K Chesterton

Posted on September 4, 2021December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on G K Chesterton

Children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

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G. K. Chesterton

Posted on August 30, 2021December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on G. K. Chesterton

In truth there are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.

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Seamus Heaney

Posted on August 30, 2021December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Seamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot . . .

Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking

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Philip Larkin

Posted on August 26, 2021December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Philip Larkin

Homage To A Government

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it’s been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it’s a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

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Kurt Vonnegut

Posted on August 25, 2021December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Kurt Vonnegut

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

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Rudyard Kipling

Posted on August 24, 2021December 13, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Rudyard Kipling

THE Camel’s hump is an ugly lump
Which well you may see at the Zoo;
But uglier yet is the hump we get
From having too little to do.

Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo,
If we haven’t enough to do-oo-oo,
We get the hump—
Cameelious hump—
The hump that is black and blue!

We climb out of bed with a frouzly head,
And a snarly-yarly voice.
We shiver and scowl and we grunt and we growl
At our bath and our boots and our toys;

And there ought to be a corner for me
(And I know’ there is one for you)
When we get the hump—
Cameelious hump—
The hump that is black and blue!

The cure for this ill is not to sit still,
Or frowst with a book by the fire;
But to take a large hoe and a shovel also,
And dig till you gently perspire;

And then you will find that the sun and the wind,
And the Djinn of the Garden too,
Have lifted the hump—
The horrible hump—
The hump that is black and blue!

I get it as well as you-oo-oo
If I haven’t enough to do-oo-oo!
We all get hump—
Cameelious hump—
Kiddies and grown-ups too!

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G K Chesterton

Posted on August 21, 2021December 13, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on G K Chesterton

Some of the most civilized and highly organized cultures, like Carthage at its wealthiest, had human sacrifice at its worst. Culture, like science, is no protection against demons.

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President Reagan

Posted on August 21, 2021December 13, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on President Reagan
The American Dream that we have nursed for so long in this country, and lately neglected, is not that every man must be level with every other man. The American Dream is that every man must be free to become whatever God intends he should become.
 
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Posted on June 19, 2021December 13, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. “One word of truth outweighs the world.”

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G K Chesterton

Posted on June 3, 2021December 14, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on G K Chesterton

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

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Konrad Adenauer

Posted on March 9, 2021December 13, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Konrad Adenauer

People who own a detached house rarely become revolutionaries.

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Samuel Johnson

Posted on January 31, 2021December 14, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Samuel Johnson

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise & labour tends, & of which every desire prompts the prosecution…It is…at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity.

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Edward Everett Hale

Posted on September 29, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Edward Everett Hale

Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds — all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have. –

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Llewellyn Powys

Posted on September 12, 2020December 14, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Llewellyn Powys

We have forgotten how to respond to the poetry of life. The hollow, tinkling facade of life put up by noisy and trivial people stands between us and our deepest wealth.

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JRR Tolkein

Posted on August 31, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on JRR Tolkein

…they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions

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Robert Tombs

Posted on August 25, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Robert Tombs

History like travel ‘broadens the mind’. The differences we encounter are precious in reminding us that our ways are not the only ways, and other cultures and other generations have achievements as great as or greater than ours. Yet in the past, as in other countries, only some things are different and much is the same – a reminder of common humanity as well as cultural diversity. We owe respect to the past as we do to other societies today, not for the sake of our predecessors, who are beyond caring, but for our own sake. Treating the past as grotesque and inferior is the attitude of the tourist who can see nothing ‘abroad’ but dirt and bad plumbing.

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Winston Spencer Churchill

Posted on August 9, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Winston Spencer Churchill

BREVITY

(Memorandum by the Prime Minister)

To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.

I ask my colleagues and their staffs to see to it that their reports are kept shorter.

  1. The aim should be Reports which set out their main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.
  2. If a Report relies on detailed analysis … these should be set out in an Appendix.
  3. Often the occasion is best met … by submitting an Aide-memoire, consisting of headings which can be expanded orally if needed.
  4. Let us have an end of phrases such as these:“It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations….” or “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect….” Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding which can be left out altogether or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short, expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.

Reports drawn up on the lines I propose may at first seem rough compared to the flat surface of officialese jargon.

But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking.

W.S.C.

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Bernard Bailyn

Posted on August 8, 2020December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Bernard Bailyn

on the danger of projecting our own certainties back on to the confusion of the past as people experienced it

The fact — the inescapable fact — is that we know how it all came out, and they did not.

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Valery Legasov

Posted on August 1, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Valery Legasov

The truth doesn’t care about our needs or our wants. It doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time.

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Czesław Miłosz

Posted on July 24, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Czesław Miłosz

Learning

To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

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A A Milne

Posted on April 4, 2020December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on A A Milne

Happiness

John had
Great Big
Waterproof
Boots on;
John had a
Great Big
Waterproof
Hat;
John had a
Great Big
Waterproof
Mackintosh —
And that
(Said John)
Is
That.

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Charles E Carryl

Posted on April 3, 2020April 2, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Charles E Carryl

The Sleepy Giant

My age is three hundred and seventy-two,
And I think, with the deepest regret,
How I used to pick up and voraciously chew
The dear little boys whom I met.
I’ve eaten them raw, in their holiday suits;
I’ve eaten them curried with rice;
I’ve eaten them baked, in their jackets and boots,
And found them exceedingly nice.
But now that my jaws are too weak for such fare,
I think it exceedingly rude
To do such a thing, when I’m quite well aware
Little boys do not like being chewed.

And so I contentedly live upon eels,
And try to do nothing amiss,
And I pass all the time I can spare from my meals
In innocent slumber — like this.

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Henry David Thoreau

Posted on April 2, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Henry David Thoreau

I am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.

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Fleur Adcock

Posted on April 1, 2020December 5, 2021 By Crispin No Comments on Fleur Adcock

 
Immigrant

November ’63: eight months in London.
I pause on the low bridge to watch the pelicans:
they float swanlike, arching their white necks
over only slightly ruffled bundles of wings,
burying awkward beaks in the lake’s water.

I clench cold fists in my Marks and Spencer`s jacket
and secretly test my accent once again:
St James’s Park; St James’s Park; St James’s Park.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley

Posted on March 31, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Percy Bysshe Shelley

A Dirge

Rough Wind, that moanest loud
Grief too sad for song;
Wild wind, when sullen cloud
Knells all the night long;
Sad storm, whose tears are vain,
Bare woods, whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main, _
Wail, for the world’s wrong!

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Piet Hein

Posted on March 30, 2020March 29, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Piet Hein

Thoughts On A Station Platform

It ought to be plain
how little you gain
by getting excited
and vexed.

You’ll always be late
for the previous train,
and always in time
for the next.

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Henry Reed

Posted on March 29, 2020March 27, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Henry Reed

Naming of Parts                                                       

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have naming of parts.

 

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Hilaire Belloc

Posted on March 28, 2020March 27, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Hilaire Belloc

Tarantella

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark veranda)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn’t got a penny,
And who weren’t paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the din?
And the hip! hop! hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the swirl and the twirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in–
And the ting, tong, tang of the guitar!
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar;
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground,
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far waterfall like doom.

 

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G K Chesterton

Posted on March 27, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on G K Chesterton
The Donkey

When forests walked and fishes flew
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood,
Then, surely, I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening bray
And ears like errant wings—
The devil's walking parody
Of all four-footed things:

The battered outlaw of the earth
Of ancient crooked will;
Scourge, beat, deride me—I am dumb—
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour—
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout around my head
And palms about my feet.
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Moniza Alvi

Posted on March 26, 2020March 27, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Moniza Alvi

Arrival 1946

The boat docked in Liverpool.
From the train Tariq stared
at an unbroken line of washing
from the North West to Euston.

These are strange people, he thought
an Empire, and all this washing,
the underwear, the Englishmen’s garden.
It was Monday, and very sharp.

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Eugene Guillevic

Posted on March 25, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Eugene Guillevic

Elegies

He probably held too tightly
(In the palm of his hand,
Looking out on the sea)

To the sand the wind
Was taking, grain by grain —

He who is held by the fear
Of becoming mist.

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E E Cummings

Posted on March 24, 2020March 25, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on E E Cummings

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles, and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles; and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

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Czeslaw Milosz

Posted on March 23, 2020March 25, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Czeslaw Milosz

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no man worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man didn’t embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
On straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

 

 

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John Masefield

Posted on March 22, 2020March 25, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on John Masefield

 

Cargoes

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.


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Philip Larkin

Posted on March 21, 2020March 25, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Philip Larkin

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf,
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again,
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

 

 

 

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Otto von Bismark

Posted on February 15, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Otto von Bismark

Politics… is the capacity to choose in each fleeting moment of the situation that which is least harmful or most opportune… With a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and with a pirate I try to be a pirate and a half.

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Thomas Babington Macaulay

Posted on February 11, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Thomas Babington Macaulay

On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

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Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury

Posted on February 3, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury

Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.

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Sir Roger Scruton

Posted on January 20, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Sir Roger Scruton

If we are thinking intellectually the world of scholarship and education has turned in this negative direction, always preferring debunking explanations of everything, reducing them to the lowest motive – its not truth but power that we persue – and all that Foucauldian nonesense. I think the only response to that is to come up with “bunking” explanations so to speak, to try to put back into the subject matter ones own inherint belief in it and to recognise that we are not around on this earth for every long and we do have an obligation to find the things that we love and not the things that we reject and those things we love, the best way towards them is to look at the things that other people have loved. That is what a culture is, it the residue of all the things that people have thought worthwhile to preserve. Teaching that will again reconnect us to what matters.

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Sir Roger Scruton

Posted on January 17, 2020January 12, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Sir Roger Scruton

Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken

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Sir Roger Scruton

Posted on January 16, 2020January 12, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Sir Roger Scruton

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

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Sir Roger Scruton

Posted on January 15, 2020January 12, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Sir Roger Scruton

Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down’, which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.

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Sir Roger Scruton

Posted on January 14, 2020January 12, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Sir Roger Scruton

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.

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Sir Roger Scruton

Posted on January 13, 2020January 12, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Sir Roger Scruton

The practice of buying rounds in the pub is one of the great cultural achievements of the English

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Sir Roger Scruton

Posted on January 12, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Sir Roger Scruton

Conservatism […] is the instinct we all ultimately share, at least if we’re happy in this world; it’s the instinct to hold on to what we love.

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G K Chesterton

Posted on January 12, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on G K Chesterton

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

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Henri Estienne

Posted on January 4, 2020 By Crispin No Comments on Henri Estienne
If youth knew; if age could.
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Clive James

Posted on November 27, 2019 By Crispin No Comments on Clive James

Japanese Maple

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that.That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

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Roger Scruton

Posted on July 22, 2019 By Crispin No Comments on Roger Scruton

We are entering a realm of cultural darkness, in which rational argument and respect for the opponent are disappearing…there is only one permitted view, and a licence to persecute all the heretics that do not subscribe to it.

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Fernando Pessoa

Posted on April 29, 2019 By Crispin No Comments on Fernando Pessoa

To be great, be whole;
Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
Because it blooms up above.

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Hermann Hesse

Posted on April 27, 2019 By Crispin No Comments on Hermann Hesse
My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams — like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.
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Juvenal (transalted by Dryden (and quoted by Benjamin Franklin))

Posted on April 21, 2019 By Crispin No Comments on Juvenal (transalted by Dryden (and quoted by Benjamin Franklin))

Look round the habitable world, how few
Know their own good; or knowing it, pursue.
How void of reason are our hopes and fears!
What in the conduct of our life appears
So well design’d, so luckily begun,
But, when we have our wish, we wish undone?

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Josh Billings (possibly)

Posted on March 9, 2019March 9, 2019 By Crispin No Comments on Josh Billings (possibly)

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. Its what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

 

(like attributing this quote to Mark Twain)

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Lord Palmerston

Posted on January 12, 2019 By Crispin No Comments on Lord Palmerston

Frenchman: ‘If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman.’
Palmerston: ‘If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman.’

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Posted on January 11, 2019 By Crispin No Comments on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

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Carl Jung

Posted on January 9, 2019 By Crispin No Comments on Carl Jung

People don’t have ideas; ideas have people.

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John Masefield

Posted on December 31, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on John Masefield

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust too.

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Roger Scruton

Posted on November 7, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Roger Scruton

Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.

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G K Chesterton

Posted on November 3, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on G K Chesterton

A man can pretend to be wise; a man cannot pretend to be witty.

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George Orwell

Posted on October 8, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on George Orwell

The Home Guard could only exist in a country where men feel themselves free. Totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle & tell him to take it home & keep it in his bedroom.

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Posted on October 5, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Mathematicians think in proofs, lawyers in constructs, logicians in operators, dancers in movement, artists in impressions, and idiots in labels.

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Philip Larkin

Posted on September 16, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Philip Larkin

My secret flaw is just not being very good, like everyone else.

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Julius Caesar

Posted on September 11, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Julius Caesar

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

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Corita Kent (popularised by her brother John Kent)

Posted on August 5, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Corita Kent (popularised by her brother John Kent)

Rule 1: Find a place you trust, and then, try trusting it for awhile.

Rule 2: (General Duties of a Student)
Pull everything out of your teacher.
Pull everything out of your fellow students.

Rule 3: (General Duties of a Teacher)
Pull everything out of your students.

Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.

Rule 5: Be Self Disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.

Rule 6: Follow the leader. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.

Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch onto things. You can fool the fans–but not the players.

Rule 8: Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.

Rule 9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It is lighter than you think.

Rule 10: We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for “x” quantities.

Helpful Hints:

Always Be Around.
Come or go to everything.

Always go to classes.
Read everything you can get your hands on.
Look at movies carefully and often.
SAVE EVERYTHING. It might come in handy later.

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H L Mencken

Posted on August 4, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on H L Mencken

Wealth – any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.

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Richard Russo

Posted on July 14, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Richard Russo

Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussions was to become further entrenched in our original positions

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G K Chesterton

Posted on July 13, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on G K Chesterton

If we are uneducated, we shall not know how very old are all new ideas.

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Sir Edmund Hillary

Posted on May 24, 2018 By Crispin 2 Comments on Sir Edmund Hillary

For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.

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Richard Rohr

Posted on May 22, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Richard Rohr

For poetry to be most effective, I believe it should be spoken aloud, embodied. After all, God didn’t think, “Let there be light”. God spoke, and creation vibrated into existence. Isn’t it just like our Creator to imprint the subtlety and mystery of creativity in the thisness of each voice?

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Malcolm Muggeridge

Posted on May 7, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Malcolm Muggeridge

Another disastrous concept is the pursuit of happiness, a last?minute improvisation in the American Declaration of Independence, substituted for the defense of Property. Happiness pursued cannot be caught, and if it could, it would not be happiness.

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C S Lewis

Posted on April 16, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on C S Lewis

To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?

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Czeslaw Milosz

Posted on April 15, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Czeslaw Milosz

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no man worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man didn’t embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
On straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

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T S Eliot

Posted on April 12, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on T S Eliot

I must tell you that I should really like to think there’s something wrong with me – Because, if there isn’t, then there’s something wrong with the world itself – and that’s much more frightening! That would be terrible. So I’d rather believe there is something wrong with me, that could be put right.

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Posted on April 11, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in bliss so that nothing but bubbles would dance on the surface of his bliss, as on a sea…and even then every man, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer libel, would play you some loathsome trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive rationality his fatal fantastic element…simply in order to prove to himself that men still are men and not piano keys.

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Jordan Peterson

Posted on April 10, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Jordan Peterson

The thing about wisdom is it stops you running face first into walls.

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Horatio Nelson

Posted on April 6, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Horatio Nelson

Close with a Frenchman, but out-maneuver a Russian.

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Richard Rohr

Posted on April 1, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Richard Rohr

…all metaphors by necessity walk with a limp.

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Margaret Atwood

Posted on March 29, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Margaret Atwood

In spring at the end of the day you should smell like dirt.

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Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Posted on March 28, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.

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Ken Dodd

Posted on March 12, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Ken Dodd

Ken Dodd on Parkinson: “If you tell a joke in Glasgow, they laugh. In Birmingham, they don’t.”
Parkinsons: “Why’s that?”
Ken Dodd: “They can’t hear it.”

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Henry George

Posted on March 9, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Henry George

Blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations prevent their own people from trading. Protection does to us in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.

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Wendy Cope

Posted on March 5, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Wendy Cope

on poetry…

It’s anecdotal evidence
About the human heart.

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George Macdonald

Posted on February 28, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on George Macdonald

The one principle of hell is — “I am my own!”

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T S Eliot

Posted on February 26, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on T S Eliot

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss

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Robert A Heinlein

Posted on February 25, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Robert A Heinlein

Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it

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Samuel Johnson

Posted on February 23, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Samuel Johnson

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at a very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which by mere labour be obtained is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critick.

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Billy Graham

Posted on February 21, 2018 By Crispin 2 Comments on Billy Graham

Someday you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God.

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Sir Thomas More

Posted on February 20, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Sir Thomas More

It is possible to live for the next life and still be merry in this.

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Carl Jung

Posted on February 19, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Carl Jung

Beware of unearned wisdom

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Tony Benn

Posted on February 17, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Tony Benn

Never give your audience your second best speech.

advice to Daniel Hannan shortly before he stood for his first election

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Albert Maysles

Posted on February 15, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Albert Maysles

Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.

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Fyodor Dostoevsky

Posted on February 10, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Fyodor Dostoevsky

They fight and fight and fight; they are fighting now, they fought before, and they’ll fight in the future … So you see, you can say anything about world history … Except one thing, that is. It cannot be said that world history is reasonable.

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Marcus Aurelius

Posted on February 1, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Marcus Aurelius

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.

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Thomas More

Posted on January 31, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Thomas More

One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Posted on January 30, 2018 By Crispin 1 Comment on Friedrich Nietzsche

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

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Only

Posted on January 29, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Only

She told him that she loved him

Only she told him that she loved him
She only told him that she loved him
She told only him that she loved him
She told him only that she loved him
She told him that only she loved him
She told him that she only loved him
She told him that she loved only him
She told him that she loved him only

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Richard Rorty (1998)

Posted on January 28, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Richard Rorty (1998)

…members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… …All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

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Assar Lindbeck

Posted on January 27, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Assar Lindbeck

In many cases, rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing

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Arthur Ransome

Posted on January 26, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Arthur Ransome

The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.

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Freeman Dyson

Posted on January 25, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Freeman Dyson

The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires.

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Michael Oakeshott

Posted on January 24, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Michael Oakeshott

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

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Leo Tolstoy

Posted on January 23, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Leo Tolstoy

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.

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Jordan Peterson

Posted on January 22, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Jordan Peterson

In answer to the question “What are the most valuable things everyone should know?”

Tell the truth.
Do not do things that you hate.
Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act.
Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
If you have to choose, be the one who does things, instead of the one who is seen to do things.
Pay attention.
Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you need to know. Listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you.
Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationships.
Be careful who you share good news with.
Be careful who you share bad news with.
Make at least one thing better every single place you go.
Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.
Do not allow yourself to become arrogant or resentful.
Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.
If old memories still make you cry, write them down carefully and completely.
Maintain your connections with people.
Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or artistic achievement.
Treat yourself as if you were someone that you are responsible for helping.
Ask someone to do you a small favour, so that he or she can ask you to do one in the future.
Make friends with people who want the best for you.
Do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued, and be very careful about rescuing someone who does.
Nothing well done is insignificant.
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
Dress like the person you want to be.
Be precise in your speech.
Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
Don’t avoid something frightening if it stands in your way — and don’t do unnecessarily dangerous things.
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
Do not transform your wife into a maid.
Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.
Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
Read something written by someone great.
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
Don’t let bullies get away with it.
Write a letter to the government if you see something that needs fixing — and propose a solution.
Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know.
Be grateful in spite of your suffering.

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Meister Eckhart

Posted on January 21, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Meister Eckhart

God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away.

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Herodotus

Posted on January 20, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Herodotus

Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give lustre, and many more people see than weigh.

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Robert Quillen

Posted on January 19, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Robert Quillen

Self-written “Obituary”

He was a writer of paragraphs and short editorials. He always hoped to write something of permanent value, but the business of making a living took most of his time and he never got around to it. In his youth he felt an urge to reform the world, but during the latter years of his life he decided that he would be doing rather well if he kept himself out of jail. … When the last clod had fallen, workmen covered the grave with a granite slab bearing the inscription: “Submitted to the Publisher by Robert Quillen.”

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Arthur Ransome

Posted on January 17, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Arthur Ransome

They found, like many explorers before them, that somehow, in their absence, they had got into trouble at home.

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Freeman Dyson

Posted on January 16, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Freeman Dyson

Fifty years ago Kurt Gödel… proved that the world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible. … I hope that the notion of a final statement of the laws of physics will prove as illusory as the notion of a formal decision process for all mathematics. If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed, I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination.

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Michael Oakeshott

Posted on January 15, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Michael Oakeshott

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

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Michael Sandel

Posted on January 14, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Michael Sandel

We have heard a lot about anger against elites – and I think that anger has a certain shape it’s an anger at the meritocratic hubris of those on top who have inhaled quite deeply of their success who are pretty confident that they deserve to have landed on top and by implication that those who are disadvantaged deserve their place as well, there is something galling, insulting, humiliating about the meritocratic hubris and leads those on top to a certain kind of smugness to look across the distribution of income and wealth and power and opportunities and to conclude that they are on top because they deserve to be.

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John F Kennedy

Posted on January 13, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on John F Kennedy

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

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G K Chesterton

Posted on January 8, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on G K Chesterton

There is, perhaps, in our world a little too much of the practice of poring over new ideas until they become old. We require a little of the practice of poring over old ideas until they become new.

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Daniel Hannan

Posted on January 7, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on Daniel Hannan

When the esteem of our peers matters more than the opinion of strangers, we start looking for traitors rather than converts, striving to outdo one another in the intensity of our rage.

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@Nicole_Cliffe

Posted on January 5, 2018 By Crispin No Comments on @Nicole_Cliffe

We were all rich. There are not two kinds of rich people. All rich people are the same. You give it all away and cease being rich, or you don’t. Jesus was no idiot.

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Rowan Williams

Posted on December 24, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Rowan Williams

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

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Rory Stewart

Posted on November 21, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart to Steve a drystone waller: How much can you build in a day
Steve: A good drystone waller can build four metres in a day. A bad waller can build six.

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Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

Posted on November 6, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!

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Robert Pirosh

Posted on October 22, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Robert Pirosh

Dear Sir:

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.

I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.

I have just returned and I still like words.

May I have a few with you?

Robert Pirosh

15 years before he won a best original screenplay Oscar

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Isidor Isaac Rabi

Posted on October 13, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Isidor Isaac Rabi

My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” That difference — asking good questions — made me become a scientist.

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A A Gill

Posted on October 7, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on A A Gill

Boris…is without doubt the very worst putative politician I’ve ever seen in action…and I can’t think of a higher compliment.

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George Bernard Shaw

Posted on October 6, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on George Bernard Shaw

response to receiving and draft of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Confound you and your book: you are no more to be trusted with a pen than a child with a torpedo.

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Bertrand Russell

Posted on September 30, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Bertrand Russell

Dear Sir Oswald,

Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.

I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.

I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.

Yours sincerely,

Bertrand Russell

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William Stafford

Posted on September 29, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on William Stafford

Vacation

One scene as I bow to pour her coffee:-

Three Indians in the scouring drouth
Huddle at the grave scooped in the gravel,
Lean to the wind as our train goes by.
Someone is gone.
There is dust on everything in Nevada.

I pour the cream.

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Robert Hayden

Posted on September 17, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Robert Hayden

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

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Marquis de Favras

Posted on September 16, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Marquis de Favras

Last words after reading his death sentence before being hanged

I see that you have made 3 spelling mistakes.

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Posted on September 4, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Risk as Virtue
Finally, when young people who “want to help mankind” come to me, asking: “What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world” and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level. My suggestion is:
1) never engage in virtue signaling;
2) never engage in rent seeking;
3) you must start a business. Take risks, start a business.
Yes, take risk, and if you get rich (what is optional) spend your money generously on others. We need people to take (bounded) risks. The entire idea is to move these kids away from the macro, away from abstract universal aims, that social engineering that bring tail risks to society. Doing business will always help; institutions may help but they are equally likely to harm (I am being optimistic; I am certain that except for a few most do end up harming).
Risk is the highest virtue.

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Alexander Pope

Posted on August 12, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Alexander Pope

Men dream of courtship, but in wedlock wake.

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John Selden

Posted on July 28, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on John Selden

Equity is a roguish thing. For Law we have a measure, know what to trust to; Equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is Equity. ‘T is all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a “foot” a Chancellor’s foot; what an uncertain measure would this be!

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Ronald Reagan

Posted on June 30, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Ronald Reagan

The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.

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Bismarck

Posted on June 12, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Bismarck

Politics is gambling for high stakes with other people’s money… Politics is a job that can be compared with navigation in uncharted waters. One has no idea how the weather or the currents will be or what storms one is in for. In politics, there is the added fact that one is largely dependent on the decisions of others, decisions on which one was counting and which then do not materialise; one’s actions are never completely one’s own. And if the friends on whose support one is relying change their minds, which is something that one cannot vouch for, the whole plan miscarries… One’s enemies one can count on – but one’s friends!

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Marcus Tullius Cicero

Posted on June 8, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Marcus Tullius Cicero

Nothing is more fickle than people in a crowd, nothing harder to discover than how men intend to vote, nothing trickier than the whole way in which elections work.

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Upton Sinclair

Posted on May 28, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Upton Sinclair

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

Posted on May 26, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Ludwig Wittgenstein

Does an ‘explanation’ make it any less impressive.

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Catherine Aird

Posted on May 24, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Catherine Aird

If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.

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Thomas Jefferson

Posted on May 14, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Thomas Jefferson

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

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C S Lewis

Posted on May 9, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on C S Lewis

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.

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Robert Conquest

Posted on May 8, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Robert Conquest

Three Laws of Politics:

1) Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2) Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3) The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

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Alphonso X

Posted on May 1, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Alphonso X

Burn old logs
Drink old wine
Read old books
Keep old friends,

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Plato

Posted on April 12, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Plato

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

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Edward Thomas

Posted on April 9, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Edward Thomas

(on the centenary of his death at the Battle of Arras)

In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.

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Najwa Zebian

Posted on April 7, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Najwa Zebian

These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb.

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Pablo Picasso

Posted on March 4, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Pablo Picasso

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

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Non Phonetic Alphabet

Posted on February 17, 2017November 30, 2022 By Crispin 3 Comments on Non Phonetic Alphabet

A as in Aisle
B as in Bdellium (the b is silent)
C as in Czar
D as in Djinn
E as in Eye
F as in Felinfoel (Welsh town, pronounced Velinfoe)
G as in Gnat
H as in Hour
I as in Irk or Ian
J as in Junta
K as in Know
L as in Llullaillaco (South American volcano pronounced Yu.Yai.Ya.ko)
M as in Mnemonic
N as in Ndebele
O as in One or Oestrogen or Ouija
P as in Pneumatic or indeed phonetic
Q as in Quay
R as in Rzeznik (the polish pronunciation has a silent R)
S as in Szilard (or Sgraffitto)
T as in Tzar (it is an added bonus to have one word that represents two letters but if you think that might be confusing somehow you can use Tsunami instead)
U as in Urn
V as in Veni vidi vici (each word pronounced with a w)
W as in Whole
X as in Xhosa or Xavier
Y as in Yvonne or Ylang Ylang
Z as in Zhivago

bonus phonetic but confusing

A as in H
D as in W
E as in F, E, M, N or X
S as in C (Sea)
W as in Y (Why)
Y as in U (You)

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Enver Hoxha

Posted on January 7, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Enver Hoxha

This year will be harder than last year. On the other hand, it will be easier than next year.

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C S Lewis

Posted on January 1, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on C S Lewis

You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow.

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Posted on January 1, 2017 By Crispin No Comments on Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Everything before the “but” is meant to be ignored by the speaker; and everything after the “but” should be ignored by the listener.

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G K Chesterton

Posted on December 25, 2016 By Crispin No Comments on G K Chesterton

There were three things prefigured and promised by the gifts in the cave of Bethlehem concerning the Child who received them; that He should be crowned like a King: that He should be worshiped like a God; and that He should die like a man. And these things would sound like Eastern flattery, were it not for the third.

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Arkell v. Pressdram

Posted on December 14, 2016 By Crispin No Comments on Arkell v. Pressdram

29th April 1971

Dear Sir,

We act for Mr Arkell who is Retail Credit Manager of Granada TV Rental Ltd. His attention has been drawn to an article appearing in the issue of Private Eye dated 9th April 1971 on page 4. The statements made about Mr Arkell are entirely untrue and clearly highly defamatory. We are therefore instructed to require from you immediately your proposals for dealing with the matter.

Mr Arkell’s first concern is that there should be a full retraction at the earliest possible date in Private Eye and he will also want his costs paid. His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply.

Yours,

(Signed)

Goodman Derrick & Co.

——————————

Dear Sirs,

We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr. J. Arkell.

We note that Mr Arkell’s attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.

Yours,

Private Eye

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@giles_fraser

Posted on December 11, 2016 By Crispin No Comments on @giles_fraser

Extraordinary that all the people who self-describe as “free thinking” on Twitter all think roughly the same thing.

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A A Gill

Posted on December 10, 2016 By Crispin