#mm

There is something deep within us that sobs at endings. Why, God, does everything have to end? Why does all nature grow old? Why do spring and summer have to go? ↗

— Joe L. Wheeler

#god #nature #summer #nature

As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal. ↗

— Max Beerbohm

#generation #good #his #immortal #mr

Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man? ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#religion-philosophy #religion

Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state. ↗

— Iain Banks

#determines #fascist #free-market #matter #out

In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs’ attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives’ attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs’ importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT’s cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people’s English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails: We are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#grammar #snoot #attitude

Common sense ain't common. ↗

— Will Rogers

#common-sense

The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral. ↗

— George Steiner

#ecstasy #whisper #grammar

It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature. ↗

— John Drinkwater

#achievement #among #asserted #commonly #english

I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday. ↗

— Desmond Tutu

#been #case #church #community #death

The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labors of cabinets and foreign offices. ↗

— Richard Cobden

#commerce #depends #diffusion #education #foreign