“Whatever men have rightly said, no matter who or where, is the property of us Christians.”
Origen, who applied long-established scholarly methods of understanding ancient texts to Biblical ones, quoted in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“I don’t know if you have ever turned over a dead animal, but depending on how ripe the carcass is, there is a whiff that rises so strongly that the air itself changes color, and a kind of greasy film of rot coats your insides.”
David Beresford, in a piece on a hideous expensive cheese someone once gave him, in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #8 (Issue 57, 7-8/04)
In my latest National Post column I say Prime Minister Mark Carney and Foreign Minister Anita Anand prattling on cue about a “two-state solution” in the Middle East on the anniversary of Oct. 7 demonstrates that they are so clueless they have no clue that they are clueless.
“You may not be able to change the world, but you can at least embarrass the guilty.”
Jessica Mitford, whose best-selling 1963 exposé of the US funeral industry “The American Way of Death” did change the world, and got her named “Queen of the Muckrakers” by Time in 1970, quoted by Robert Bryce on Substack Jan. 29, 2026 [https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/yacht-zee].
“There is always a temptation to explain great events in terms of great ambitions, but the truth about Stalingrad might be much simpler. In the orders of 23 July Stalingrad was only one among many other targets and aims. It had no obvious priority over the others. It might be that the first failure to capture the city led to reinforcements being sent to make a second attempt, which also failed. More reserves were then fed into counteract the earlier failures. In this way more and more men and resources were pushed in piece by piece until the battle took on a priority of its own, quite divorced from the actual value of the supposed target. Prestige and stubbornness became the reason for the battle to continue, not the capture of Stalingrad itself. It would not be the first time such a thing had happened. The great Battle of Gettysburg that decided the American Civil War was another example. A Confederate regiment had gone to the town to capture a shoe factory, because they were short on footwear. Before they could get the shoes they were driven out by a Unionist division. The Confederates called up reinforcements and counterattacked, causing the Unionists to summon their own support. Before long the two main armies were locked in a deadly combat that neither had foreseen and neither wanted. It seems that much the same thing happened at Stalingrad.”
Rupert Matthews Stalingrad: The Battle that Shattered Hitler’s Dream of World Domination
“a high priest of the debunked Davoisie”
Conrad Black in National Post February 14, 2026 [re Mark Carney but the term applies far more widely and as far as I know originated with Black in this column].
“I could hardly avoid a sort of suspicion that some of those [Professors] whom I was taken to see had been so long engrossed in their own study of hypothetics that they had become the exact antithesis of the Athenians in the days of St. Paul; for whereas the Athenians spent their lives in nothing save to see and to hear some new thing, there were some here who seemed to devote themselves to the avoidance of every opinion with which they were not perfectly familiar, and regarded their own brains as a sort of sanctuary, to which if an opinion had once resorted, none other was to attack it.”
Samuel Butler Erewhon
“Felipe Alou, the team’s manager and club-house philosopher (and Moises’ father), maintains that no team ever won anything with their mouths.”
Maclean’s April 5, 1993