“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

“Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few.”

Ecclesiastes 5:2 [King James Version]

“Much is not dared because it seems hard; much seems hard only because it is not dared.”

“Prince Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, Austrian statesman” quoted by Louis L’Amour Education of a Wandering Man

“T: Is life nothing but a fight with evil? C: Lord, no! The fight is to defend the good – to defend such good things as freedom and free fellowship, and, above all, to defend the home. Now, what is the home? It is the place where children are born and reared. And there is no miracle more wonderful than the creation of a child. That is why I so detest the idea of birth-prevention which means the suppression of the miracle.”

G.K. Chesterton in an interview with W.R. Titterton, in Titterton’s GKC: A Portrait (1936), the first Chesterton biography, reprinted in part at least in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)

“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)