A Quote That I Vaguely Remember

Part of it was "The British Empire was created by accident and otherwise..."  it is a very witty aphorism that sounds like Samuel Johnson in my memory.   Why do I need it,  I am reading R.F. Kuang's Babel: an Arcane History.  This is a profoundly entertaining parallel universe which you will have to be enchanted by when I finish it or you read it yourself.  

Kuang is clearly a fascinatingly brilliant scholar (working on her Ph.D. at Yale now) and a spectacularly beautiful young woman.  She is one of those reminders that people in the extreme tails of intelligence have a heck of a time finding mates, because people of dissimilar intelligence lose interest in each other pretty quickly.  How I met my wife is one of those reminders that God works in mysterious ways.