“The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.”
Larry Niven Ringworld [it also turned up in “Random Foolish Quotations” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (6/04)]
“If someone asks him how he [extremely productive historian Niall Ferguson] manages his time, he says, ‘I get up in the morning and work. My puzzle is with people who spend 10 years not producing a book. What do they do?’”
National Post March 14, 2001
“This Spring, Minnesota Representative Pam Altendorf posted a video on X showing another display at the State Capitol, a plaque with the following message. ‘The Democratic Coalition of Satan Worshippers thanks Gov. Tim Walz for not standing in the way of spreading Satanism at the State Capitol Building. Satan has a special place for you.’ Indeed. GKC: ‘It has always been a definite mark of diabolism that its language was splendid and pure. For the heart of all evil religion is fear. And the sacrament of fear is flattery. For this reason the old pagans called the Furies the Gracious Ones. For this reason many modern peasants called their goblins good people because they believe that they are bad people. It is the common-sense of all diabolism that if you worship Satan you worship him as God.’”
“News With Views” “compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025) [and obviously GKC is Chesterton]
“Tim Flannery’s predictions have aged like fine milk.”
“Topher Project Ep 110” commentary by Topher Field on Flannery’s recurring media-friendly predictions that Australia would succumb to drought 4/7/25 [https://youtu.be/5tatwHXlk6M?t=230]
In my latest Loonie Politics column I identify a variety of self-defeating mental habits on display over the current Middle Eastern war that prevent decadent civilizations from prevailing in long conflicts.
“Sex is not quite so simple in practice as it is in theory.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist, possibly from the BBC radio program “The Listener” in 1933, in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“It may at first surprise those who follow the course of later Greek thought that the two great systems of Plato and Aristotle had comparatively little influence on the generations immediately following their inception, and that it was not till after several centuries that the development and partial fusion of the two took place. Nothing however, is more striking in the history of thought than the immediate transience, and the final permanence, of genial philosophical ideas.”
David Knowles The Evolution of Medieval Thought [and incidentally if a more pompous book has ever been written I missed it... mercifully]
“Donald J. Savoie has spent decades studying the inner workings of Canada’s federal bureaucracy. He’s watched Ottawa grow more centralized and more crowded with what he calls ‘poets,’ policy thinkers and advisers, while the ‘plumbers,’ the front-line workers delivering services to Canadians, have not been prioritized.”
Introduction to interview with Savoie in National Post July 26, 2025