“Chef Andrew Gruel”
The subject of a sponsored email via Human Events August 8, 2025 from the American Conservation Coalition, on “A Chef’s Take: How we fix our food and our planet”
“Her [biographer Catherine Tsalikis’s] admiration for [Chrystia] Freeland’s ambition is obvious. She paints her political views as centrist pragmatism. I would define them as aspirational progressivism. A desire for power exists; she wants to be ‘in the room where the decisions are made,’ but we don’t know why. Freeland’s ‘values’ are a confection of tasteful platitudes that signify status. One might call hers the Audi of ideologies: multiculturalism, globalization, and woke capital, all in the slipstream of careerism. Her insatiable appetite for status is the defining feature and likely her Achilles heel.”
Brad McKenzie reviewing Tsalikis’s Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)
“Many believed Lord Acton when he quipped that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This throwaway line has become one of our governing principles, so much so that Australia, and much of the West, organize virtually everything by committee and quail in the face of individual thumos outside of sport. We are suspicious of it. We see in every Great Man the shadow of the slave master. Nonetheless, power must be wielded... The wise man recognizes that life has fullest meaning in service to a good master, and that we all serve something — if not something or someone noble, then our appetites. Wartime is the most direct and prime example of service to masters; it is antiegalitarian in their sense, but egalitarian in ours, and together bound by duty and service in the most primordial sense. Against this the pseudo-liberated contemporary person feels a degree of contempt, which is why they enjoy stories of soldiers committing massacres so dearly. Nothing confirms their deepest-held beliefs more sordidly. Good masters are few and far between, because we no longer cultivate this ethic in our technocratic managerial elite. The truth is that in fleeing good masters we have not fled masters, but have merely ended up with bad ones. In attempting to achieve a self-reliant anarchy we have left open the door to those who are in fact most corruptible by power.”
Christopher Jolliffe “The Attack on ANZAC Day” in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)
“foreign policy is really domestic policy with its hat on.”
Hubert Humphrey, quoted by Sheryl Saperia, “CEO of Secure Canada”, in National Post August 5, 2025 [NB I do not agree that it necessarily is let alone should be true, but it is certainly a possibility deserving serious thought]
“Compromise, in its sound and noble sense, used to mean the ignoring of small points in order to combine upon a large point; now it means ignoring large points in order to combine on small ones.”
G.K. Chesterton in Black & White, Mar. 7, 1903, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work, – no man does – but I like what is in the work, – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
“Carroll’s widow, Anne... told us that G.K. Chesterton was not only fundamental to Warren Carroll’s thinking but to the philosophy on which he founded the college [Christendom College, in Fort Royal, VA, home to the world’s largest thurifer]. His two great precepts – ‘Truth exists’ and ‘The Incarnation happened’ – are engraved on his tombstone. Anne said, ‘That is distilling G.K. Chesterton into five words. Truth exists, the Incarnation happened.’”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“People say they fear public speaking almost as much as death (which raises the question why there aren’t more horror movies with names like ‘Podium’ and ‘Dry Mouth 2’).”
Andrew Palmer “Bartleby columnist” in The Economist September 13, 2025