Politics
According to 18th-century American politician Fisher Ames: A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always wet. When a political party is dominated
Education
From the lead article in the February issue of Atlantic Monthly: not The rising generation cannot spell, because it learned to read by the word-method; it is hampered in the use of dictionaries, because it never learned the alphabet; its English is slipshod and commonplace, because it does not
Media
From a book—a book I strongly recommend, for its on-going relevance—about press coverage of the 1972 presidential campaign: personallyprofessionally The Boys in the Bus Crouse has a point; certainly in my case. I was a journalist and a columnist in high school and college, and even today
Remarks
A punchier way to describe what economists dryly call "the division of labor": Each one of us is ludicrously ignorant of something; most of us of most things. The whole difference between a conceited man and a modest one is concerned only with how far he is conscious
Intellect
His similes are terrible, but his points are good… [T]he art critics and the dramatic critics [...] are separated by a great chasm of "culture" and fastidiousness from the people for whom they write. They [look upon] the amusements of the public, not as wine-tasters oversee wine-
History
Even after the slaughter of World War I, there could still be in 1937 an excessive faith in human progress: Today, of course, we hardly know the meaning of the word "fear" in its medieval sense. Anesthetics have removed the fear of physical pain. Logic and intelligence have
Remarks
Westminster GazetteWestminster Gazettealways -- G. K. Chesterton, 1909
Remarks
(The below was written in 1972, 12 years before the Bhopal disaster that it unintentionally and eerily prefigures.) There's a Little Bit of Union Carbide in Everybody's Home Supermoney
History
for sale The Worldly Philosophers
Politics
From an article in Foreign Affairs: The Afghanistan crisis has dramatized and intensified antecedent changes and strains in the Western alliance. There was unanimous, if separate, condemnation [...], but there were also divergent, and often acrimoniously different, assessments of the causes of aggression and the nature of the challenge. The difficulties
Education
ex parte -- G. K. Chesterton, 1906
Remarks
I presume that Samuel Beckett did not intend to write an 18-word secularized summary of the Book of Ecclesiastes, but: "All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."