“Aside from these basic tenets, the followers of Christ, in the first three centuries, divided into a hundred creeds. We should misjudge the function of history – which is to illuminate the present through the past – were we to detail the varieties of religious belief that sought and failed to capture the growing church, and which the church had to brand, one after another, as disintegrating heresies.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
In my latest Epoch Times column I say Canadians have prepared for the government to borrow itself and us into insolvency by borrowing to the brink of bankruptcy themselves, while electing politicians as insouciant about debt as they are.
“But when it comes to a fight for private property – you can’t keep women out of that. You can’t have the family farm without the family. You must have Christian marriage again: you can’t have solid small property with all this vagabond polygamy.”
G.K. Chesterton in Tales of the Long Bow, as header quotation on David Beresford in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)
“I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she’s so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.”
Saki, quoted in Globe & Mail July 17, 2000
“I’m constantly amazed that anybody cares what I do.”
U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill as “Quote of the Day” in New York Times July 21, 2002
“In the enthusiasm of its discoveries the Higher Criticism has applied to the New Testament tests of authenticity so severe that by them a hundred ancient worthies – e.g., Hammurabi, David, Socrates – would fade into legend. Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed – the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus’ arrest, Peter’s denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels. After two centuries of Higher Criticism the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature in the history of Western man.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“Pemmican can be prepared in many ways, and it is not easy to decide which method is the least objectionable. There is rubeiboo and richot, and pemmican plain and pemmican raw, this last method being the one most in vogue among voyageurs; but the richot, to me, seemed the best; mixed with a little flour and fried in a pan, pemmican in this form can be eaten, provided the appetite be sharp and there is nothing else to be had – this last consideration is, however, of importance.”
W.F. Butler The Great Lone Land
In my latest Loonie Politics column I describe Mark Carney’s chronic jetting about blabbing to his fellow Davos Man sophisticates instead of sitting at his desk making hard choices as proof that he really believes words are deeds, especially fancy abstract ones. And as brazenly hypocritical on the dreaded “carbon pollution”.