Quotes from Douglas L. Wilson

What it does serve to remind us is that learning formal English grammar from a nineteenth-century textbook, without a qualified teacher, was a truly daunting task, as anyone who picks up a copy of Kirkham's will readily see.

Grasping Armstrong by the throat came ultimately from R. B. Rutledge, though shaking him was Black's idea, and shaking him like a "rag" was Herndon and Weik's.

Jack after they had worked for a long time, caught him by leg and got better of him. L said if they wanted to wrestle fair he was ready, but if they wanted to fight he would try that – Jack quailed – called it drawn.

they Could Not vote for a man unless he Could make a hand well Said he Boys if that is all i am shure of your votes he took hold of the Cradle Led the way all the Round with Perfect ease the Boys was satisfide and i dont think he Lost a vote in the Croud

Graham's testimony reminds us of something that everyone present, including Lincoln, understood about the match – namely, that this was a rite of passage; that as a newcomer Lincoln was being tested to see what he was made of.

frontier spectators

Most every new man who came into the neighborhood had to be tried.

The fault for these disastrous developments is increasingly laid on religious cults and their leaders, and the book culminates in a grand symposium at which the conflicting and irreconcilable claims of the great religions are argued at length. The Muslims claim to have the true faith, only to have it come out that they themselves have bitter internal disagreements. The inability of the Catholics to agree with the Lutherans demonstrates that the same is true with the Christians.

the Garden of Eden story as absurd and an offense against reason.

Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) was the most famous legal treatise of its time. It was originally delivered as a series of lectures at Oxford, and its ambitious aim was to put forward a coherent and comprehensive account of a notoriously unruly subject, the law as it had evolved historically in England.