What they said

'The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.'

Aldous Huxley

“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.”

Chicago sports writer Hugh Keough, quoted by Damon Runyon. 

'There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.'

William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Henry Esmond. This is very true.

'It is said that a lady once asked Thackeray why he made all his women fools or knaves. “ Madam, I know no others.”'

Henry D Sedgwick Jr, The Atlantic, November 1898. He did not think much better of men but his books do have one hero at least (Esmond). Dobbin in Vanity Fair is a good man but his name suggests a plodding carthorse.

"Femininity inspires masculinity." Anonymous

“In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.”

Jonas Mekas. This is not true. England was right to listen to Lord Liverpool not Lord Byron.

“The ideas of modern Socialism have not sprung from proletarian brains. They were originated by intellectuals, sons of the bourgeoisie, not of wage-earners.”
Ludwig Von Mises

"Not just a street, a close, a crescent, or even a square: a boulevard! When former friends become streets , you are pleased and proud ; when one of them becomes a boulevard , you fall silent and think of eternity."

George Mikes. He also said how old it makes you feel when people who owe you money become boulevards. Sir Simon Milton, in my year at university and a Union star, certainly never borrowed money from me and I knew him only slightly, but he has been a bust in Piccadilly for more than ten years. I remember him winning a balloon debate as Amy Carter in our first term, which shows how unimaginably long ago it was.