John Buchan
John Buchan
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, GCMG, GCVO, CH, PCwas a Scottish novelist, historian and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth26 August 1875
adventure men games
I once played the chief part in a rather exciting business without ever once budging from London . And the joke of it was that the man who went out to look for adventure only saw a bit of the game, and I who sat in my chambers saw it all and pulled the strings. 'They also serve who only stand and wait,' you know.
call given highest
What would you call the highest happiness? Wratislaw was ask. The sense of competence, was the answer, given without hesitation.
greatness leadership task
The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.
years shining flesh
The robe of flesh wears thin, and with the years God shines through all things.
sea people mastery
You may hear people say that submarines have done away with the battleship, and that aircraft have annulled the mastery of the sea. That is what our pessimists say. But do you imagine that the clumsy submarine or the fragile aeroplane is really the last word of science?
hands brain matter
Fortunately for mankind the brain in a life of action turns more to the matter in hand than to conjuring up the chances of the future.
fashion blood flesh
The vows we take in the holy place bind us till we are purged of them at Inanda's Kraal. Till then no blood must be shed and no flesh eaten. It was the fashion of our forefathers.
heaven world earth
In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.
organization quality merit
Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality.
exercise care shapes
London is like the tropical bush -- if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in.
dust romance firsts
But some love not the method of your first; Romance they count it, throw't away as dust; If I should meet with such, what should I say; Must I slight them as they slight me, or nay
firsts discouragement disaster
He who would valiant be against all disaster; let him in constancy follow the Master. There's no discouragement shall make him once relent; his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim.
jobs work would-be
I would be content with any job, however thankless, in any quarter, however remote, if I had the chance of making a corner of the desert blossom and a solitary place glad.
laughing police brain
If those extra-social brains are so potent, why after all do they effect so little? A dull police-officer, with the machine behind him, can afford to laugh at most experiments in anarchy.