“Parents represent the last stand of the amateur. Every other trade and profession has developed standards, has required study and practise and licensing before releasing the student into his work….Only one profession remains untutored and untrained – the bearing and rearing of our children.”
John Lentell
3rd September, 1969
“We (the English) seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.”
(Sir John Robert Seeley, 1834 – 1895)
John Lentell
2nd September, 1969
“Children use the fist
Until they are of age to use the brain.”
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1806 – 1861)
John Lentell
1st September, 1969
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
(From Areopagitica, a speech by John Milton, 1608 – 1674)
There are things happening in Rhodesia which have nothing to do with Communism but everything to do with the fundamental rights of the man in the street and it is the man in the street who must get up off his backside and do something.
John Lentell
30th August, 1969
“Out of the earth to rest or range
Perpetual in perpetual change,
The unknown passing through the strange.”
(John Masefield, 1878 – 1967)
John Lentell
29th August, 1969
“We sleep, but the loom of life never
stops and the pattern which was
weaving when the sun went down is
weaving when it comes up tomorrow.”
(Henry Ward Beeceher, 1813 – 1887)
John Lentell
28th August, 1969
“Henry Irving getting into a hansom cab said to the cabby, ‘Drive me home.’
‘Yes, sir,’ replied the cabby, ‘what address?’
‘Why should I tell the address of my beautiful home to a common fellow like you?’ replied Irving.”
John Lentell
27th August, 1969
“We thought he was a bit of an aristocrat when he first came, but we soon found he was a decent fellow.”
(Factory workers on a managing director, reported in Picture Post)
John Lentell
26th Augsut, 1969
“Etiam sapientibus cupido gloriae novissima exuitur.”
For even with philosphers the passion for fame is often their last rag of infirmity.
(Tacitus, AD 56 – AD 117)
John Lentell
25th August, 1969
“Remember, no human condition is ever permanent; then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune, nor too sorrowful in misfortune.”
(Socrates, 469 BC – 399BC)
John Lentell
23rd August, 1969
“Orthodoxy is my doxy; heterodoxy is another man’s doxy.”
(Remark to Lord Sandwich by Bishop William Warburton, 1698 – 1779)
John Lentell
22nd August, 1969
“….The earth is nobler than the world we have built upon it;
The earth is long-suffering, solid, fruitful;
The world still shifting, dark, half-evil.
But what have I done that I should have a better world,
Even though there is in me something that will not rest
Until it sees Paradise….?”
(Second half of quotation… Johnson in ‘Johnson over Jordan‘ by J.B. Priestly, 1894 – 1984)
John Lentell
21st August, 1969
“I have been a foolish, greedy and ignorant man;
Yet I have had my time beneath the sun and the stars;
I have known the returning strength and sweetness of the seasons.
Blossom on the branch and the ripening of the fruit,
The deep rest of the grass, the salt of the sea,
The frozen ecstasy of mountains…..”
(First half of quotation… Johnson in ‘Johnson over Jordan‘ by J.B. Priestly, 1894 – 1984)
John Lentell
20th August, 1969
“It is not good for all your wishes to be fulfilled: through sickness you recognise the value of health, through evil the value of good, through hunger the value of satisfaction, through exertion the value of rest.”
(Heraclitus, 535 – 475 BC)
John Lentell
19th August, 1969
“We are all falling. This hand’s falling too –
all have this falling sickness none withstands.
And yet there’s always One whose gentle hands
this universal feeling falling can’t fall through.”
(From Autumn by Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875 – 1926)
John Lentell
17th August, 1969
“My colleagues of the Film Division of the Ministry of Information were as nice a bunch of boys and girls as ever were corduroy. I suppose most of them earned their livings before the war, but I cannot for the life of me imagine how.”
(From Clean, Bright and Slightly Oiled by Gerald Kersh, 1911 – 1968)
John Lentell
16th August, 1969
“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.”
(William Pitt, 1708 – 1778)
John Lentell
15th August, 1969
“True glory lies in noble deeds, and in the recognition, alike by leading men and by the nation at large, of valuable services rendered to the State.”
(From the Philippicae by Cicero, 106 BC to 43 BC)
John Lentell
14th August, 1969
(It doesn’t accurately describe Salisbury but no harm in hoping!)
“Her woman fair; her men robust for toil;
Her vigorous souls, high cultured as her soil;
Her towns, where civic independence flings
The gauntlet down to senates, courts and kings.”
(Thomas Campbell, 1777 – 1844)
John Lentell
13th August, 1969
“Shall Sarum always crouch beneath
Some Boroughmonger’s rod?
Or shall we still subservient be
To petty tyrant’s nod?
Indignantly forbit it all,
Forbid it, hearts so true,
And shew us, at your country’s call,
What Sarumites can do.
We’ve scorned corruption – scorn’d to bend
At Baa’ls shrine the knee;
We’ll quell opression in her might;
We’ve sworn we will be free.
The great, the good, throughout the land,
Extol the deeds we’ve done,
And call us to complete the work
We’ve gallantly begun.
Then rise, Reformers, Sarum’s friends!
Stand forth, ye tried and true,
And show us, at your city’s call,
What Sarum’s men can do.”
(In imitation of New Cornish Reform Song – “One and All”)
John Lentell
12th August, 1969
Lentell Soup 