“That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, though, was a matching principle: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was – in a formulation increasingly deployed by canon lawyers – a human ‘right’. Law, in the Latin West, had become an essential tool of its ongoing revolution.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [re Gratian and the Decretum and the resulting intellectual and procedural revolution]

“If our government were really a representative government, it would certainly not be a meddlesome government.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 15, 1924 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“Figuratively, at least, people do die of oversedation; fumbling about fearfully, blindly, they grasp the sweet-smelling potions handed them with never a look at the label, and suddenly they are dead. They died ‘natural’ deaths, then.”

Jim Thompson in Edward Gorman, ed., The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Mark Carney’s jet-setting quest for European Union “associate membership”, which doesn’t even exist anyway, is classic Carney blarney, all maze and no cheese.

“If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.”

Proverbs XXIV:10 [KJV].

“Over many hundreds of pages, the claim that empires in the remote past had regarded as perfectly legitimate customs that under the influence of Christianity had come to be regarded as crimes was rehearsed in painstaking detail. Provocatively, it was even suggested that a relish for displays of suffering – such as in ancient Rome had been staged as public entertainments in the very heart of the city – had been a civic good. ‘Rome was mistress of the world all the while she had these cruel spectacles; she sank into decline and from there into slavery as soon as Christian morals managed to persuade her that there was more wrong in watching men slaughtered than beasts.’ This reflection was not altogether an original one: the thesis that Christianity had contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was popular among historically minded philosophes. In other ways, though, the author had indeed pushed originality to an extreme. So shocking was his book that it was published without any hint of his name. The New Justine was not a work of history at all, but of fiction. Its observations on the character of ancient civilizations formed merely one strand in a vast tapestry, woven to demonstrate a disorienting proposition: that ‘virtue is not a world of priceless worth, it is just a way of behaving that varies according to climate and consequently is nothing real about it’. To think otherwise was imbecility.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [The author in question is the Marquis de Sade, who Holland takes very seriously as a philosopher and not in a good way.]

“Why are you making that noise with your face?”

Me March 27 2006 [listening to someone drone on].

In my latest National Post column I say Mark Carney’s “Investment Summit” was classic Carney blarney, windy and impractical.