“Forge a testimonial”

I think mere progress a far more vulgar and even illiterate ideal than mere popularity. To look to the future is merely to forge a testimonial from the babe unborn. And, if we look to the past, we find a hundred eccentrics whom fame has forgotten to one whom it has justified.

Illustrated London News, 3 November 1917.

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Published in: on June 26, 2019 at 12:08 am  Leave a Comment  

“To love anything”

To love anything is to see it at once under lowering skies of danger.

All Things Considered (1908).

Published in: on June 12, 2019 at 11:55 am  Comments (2)  

“Minding their own business”

A queer and almost mad notion seems to have got into the modern head that, if you mix everybody and everything more or less anyhow, the mixture may be called unity, and the unity may be called peace. It is supposed that, if you break down all doors and walls so that there is no domesticity, there will then be nothing but friendship. Surely somebody must have noticed by this time that the men living in a hotel quarrel at least as often as the men living in a street… These foolish people trace all the chances of war to the very thing which will always be the best chance of peace — men’s habit of dwelling in their own boundaries and minding their own business. The only hope of attaining amity lies, not in ignoring boundaries, but, on the contrary, in respecting them.

Illustrated London News, 8 September 1917.

Published in: on June 5, 2019 at 11:41 am  Comments (2)