The parochial organisation should always be attacked

Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that 'suits' him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.

The reasons are obvious. In the first place the parochial organisation should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy [God] desires. The congregational principle, on the other hand, makes each church into a kind of club, and finally, if all goes well, into a coterie or faction.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape letters (1942), 81

It is a fact amazing to ordinary mortals that The Jupiter is never wrong

I wanted to post the entire chapter on the power of the press from The Warden, but it's too long. This is the best bit - the entire thing is here.

It is a fact amazing to ordinary mortals that The Jupiter [i.e. the Times] is never wrong. With what endless care, with what unsparing labour, do we not strive to get together for our great national council the men most fitting to compose it. And how we fail! Parliament is always wrong: look at The Jupiter, and see how futile are their meetings, how vain their council, how needless all their trouble! With what pride do we regard our chief ministers, the great servants of state, the oligarchs of the nation on whose wisdom we lean, to whom we look for guidance in our difficulties! But what are they to the writers of The Jupiter? They hold council together and with anxious thought painfully elaborate their country's good; but when all is done, The Jupiter declares that all is naught. Why should we look to Lord John Russell - why should we regard Palmerston and Gladstone, when Tom Towers without a struggle can put us right? Look at our generals, what faults they make; at our admirals, how inactive they are. What money, honesty, and science can do, is done; and yet how badly are our troops brought together, fed, conveyed, clothed, armed, and managed. The most excellent of our good men do their best to man our ships, with the assistance of all possible external appliances; but in vain. All, all is wrong - alas! alas! Tom Towers, and he alone, knows all about it. Why, oh why, ye earthly ministers, why have ye not followed more closely this heaven-sent messenger that is among us?

A. Trollope, The Warden (1855), 181

Ever rising on stepping-stones of dead whiskies and sodas

Where most of his [Galahad's] contemporaries had reluctantly thrown in the towel and retired to Harrogate and Buxton to nurse their gout, he had gone blithely on, ever rising on stepping-stones of dead whiskies and sodas to higher things. He had discovered the prime grand secret of eternal youth - to keep the decanter circulating and never to go to bed before four in the morning. His eye was not dimmed nor his natural force abated, his heart was of gold and in the right place, and he was loved by all except the female members of his own family.

P.G. Wodehouse, Full Moon (1947), 65

One of the many gods that Dr. Juvenal Urbino wrote with a small g

the Revered Jonathan B. Lynch, a lean black Protestant minister who rode on a mule through the poverty-stricken settlements in the salt marshes, preaching the word of one of the many gods that Dr. Juvenal Urbino wrote with a small g to distinguish them from his own.

G. Garcia Marquez, Love in the time of Cholera (1985), tr. E.Grossman (1988), 241

They like command better than power

military men are the opposite of you, general, they're men of quick and easy ambition, they like command better than power and they're not in the service of something but of someone, and that's why it's so easy to make use of them, he said, especially one against the other,

G. Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), 160

The Liberals were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests

The Liberals ... were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce,  to recognise the rights of illegitimate children as equal to those of legitimate ones, and to cut up the country into a federal system that would take power away from the supreme authority. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who had received their power directly from God, proposed the establishment of public order and family morality. They were the defenders of the faith of Jesus Christ, of the principle of authority, and were not prepared to permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities.

G. Garcia Marquez, One hundred years of solitude (1967), 98

Billy didn't think there would be a blank cartridge in a squad that small, in a war that old

Billy closed that one eye, saw in his memory of the future poor old Edgar Derby in front of a firing squad in the ruins of Dresden. There were only four men in that squad. Billy had heard that one man in each firing squad was customarily given a rifle loaded with a blank cartridge. Billy didn't think there would be a blank cartridge in a squad that small, in a war that old.

K. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5 (1969), 86