Christmas Every Day

Winston Churchill was an army lieutenant during Lord Kitchener’s campaign against the Mahdists of the Sudan. He was highly critical of the Islam he encountered but also of Kitchener’s brutality in ealing with prisoners and his mutilation of the Mahdi’s corpse. (Kitchener kept the skull). In his book on the campaign, The River War, Churchill said: there are many people in England, and perhaps elsewhere, who seem to be unable to contemplate military operations for clear political objects, unless they can cajole themselves into the belief that their enemy are utterly and hopelessly vile. To this end the Dervishes, from the Mahdi and the Khalifa downwards, have been loaded with every variety of abuse and charged with all conceivable crimes. This may be very comforting to philanthropic persons at home; but when an army in the field becomes imbued with the idea that the enemy are vermin who cumber the earth, instances of barbarity may easily be the outcome. This unmeasured condemnation is moreover as unjust as it is dangerous and unnecessary.

“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
Gang aft agley.
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!”

— Robbie Burns

But according to Wikipedia: Although attributed to Burns, the Selkirk Grace was already known in the 17th century, as the “Galloway Grace” or the “Covenanters’ Grace”. It came to be called the Selkirk Grace because Burns was said to have delivered it at a dinner given by the Earl of Selkirk.

He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he who loses his courage loses all.

— Miguel de Cervantes

This saying was recast on the lips of E.W. Hornung’s fictional English jewel thief, Raffles, who said: “Money lost, little lost; honour lost, much lost; pluck lost, all lost.”

To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.

— Ogden Nash

“A man is very dishonorable to sell himself / for anything other than quite a lot of pelf.”

— Ogden Nash

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I do plan to be on the podium with President Clinton when she’s inaugurated in January 2017 – but I’m going to be sitting with the senators.

— Tim Kaine

It is arguable whether the human race have been gainers by the march of science beyond the steam engine. Electricity opens a field of infinite conveniences to ever greater numbers, but they may well have to pay dearly for them. But anyhow in my thought I stop short of the internal combustion engine which has made the world so much smaller. Still more must we fear the consequences of entrusting a human race so little different from their predecessors of the so-called barbarous ages such awful agencies as the atomic bomb. Give me the horse.

— Winston Churchill, 1951

Today is the birthday of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689 – 1755) who wrote widely and said:

“An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.”