Posted by
Andrews on Tuesday, January 10, 2012 1:20:10 PM
As regular readers no doubt know, I failed to post my daily stupid quote yesterday. I had what I thought was a good quote from the night before, but once I began writing, it struck me that the entire essay was just unfocussed and not terribly interesting. Since I was too ill to try to find a new quote, I decided to wait until later and then provide a new and better essay.
However, I have been searching this morning while working and have not yet come up with even the hint of a good quote. I found a few possibilities, but once I began writing, the final essays proved much weaker than I had expected.
The problem I have found is that most of the quotes which are gathered on hagiographic pages of quotes by great men and women tend to be bland platitudes which could offend no one. And it is even worse with liberals, as they tend to say things which read as very sensible, the trouble coming from the idiosyncratic way in which liberals apply these principles or redefine key words. So, just looking through lists of quotes online, I have found very few which would support a reasonably interesting essay.
I could probably have pushed ahead with a silly quote from Woodrow Wilson claiming to be a citizen of the world. Or maybe another essay which discussed the fallacy in believing that citizens must be involved in politics for state to be healthy. However, neither is a particularly stirring topic, so I decided to wait until I find something better.
Obviously, it is early, and I have a lot of potential sources of quotes, so I shall probably find something before midnight. Hopefully two, so I have one for yesterday and today. But I wanted to mention that things were going somewhat poorly, in case I have trouble finding the two quotes I promised.