About 'escapism', never let that flea stick in your ear. I was liberated from it once & for all when a friend said 'These critics are v. sensitive to the least hint of Escape. Now what class of men wd. one expect to be thus worked-up about Escape- Jailers.'

-Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3 (To Arthur C. Clark, January 26, 1954)

...but in all collections of men, the straw and rubbish (as Lord Bacon says) float on the top, while gold and jewels sink and are hidden. Or, what is more apposite still, many men, or most men, are a compound of precious and worthless together, and their worthless swims, and their precious lies at the bottom.

Blessed John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain (1848)

So assiduous have [the media] been in seeking out anything that can pass for wrong-doing ...as the only salient feature of their candidacy that when real wrong-doing comes along it only looks like politics as usual.

-James Bowman (H/T Mike Flynn)