John Robson

1 week ago | thejohnrobson.com | John Robson

“‘My friends, I have no more against work than the next man,’ Bobby [O’Brien, who was totally lazy] would reply. ‘In fact, nothing fascinates me more than work. I can sit here and watch it all day, if you’ll only give me the chance.’” “The Week of Sundays,” called just “this old tale”, in William Bennett The Book of Virtues [but it owes a lot, perhaps too much, to a similar line from Jerome K. Jerome]

1 week ago | thejohnrobson.com | John Robson

“In 2011, a cartoon of Muhammad appeared on the cover of Charlie Hebdo. The following year he was depicted crouching on all fours, his genitals bared. The mockery would not cease, so Charlie Hebdo’s editor vowed, until ‘Islam has been rendered as banal as Catholicism’. This it was, in a secular society, for Muslims to be treated as equals. Except that they were not being treated as equals.

2 weeks ago | thejohnrobson.com | John Robson

“His [Cicero’s] incredible vanity appears more amiably here [in his letters] than in his orations, where he seems to be carrying his own statue with him wherever he goes…”

2 weeks ago | thejohnrobson.com | John Robson

“Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”G.K. Chesterton in “Fear of the Past” in What’s Wrong With The World, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6

2 weeks ago | thejohnrobson.com | John Robson

“To [the Marquis de] Sade, of course, it had all been folly. There was no brotherhood of man; there was no duty owed by the weak to the strong. Evangelicals, like Jacobins, were the dupes of their shared inheritance: their belief in progress; their conviction in the potential of reform; their faith in humanity might be brought to light.