“Starving Bull had succeeded in killing a skunk during his journey. This performance, while highly creditable to his energy as a hunter, was by no means conducive to his success, as a cook. Bitterly did that skunk revenge himself upon us who had borne no part in his destruction. Pemmican is at no time a delicacy; But pemmican flavored with skunk was more than I could attempt. However, Starving Bull proved himself worthy of his name, and the frying-pan was soon scraped clean under his hungry manipulations.”

W.F. Butler The Great Lone Land

“Comfort over everything”

Subject line on MEC email touting new camping gear June 19, 2024 [and what a slogan for our gormless hedonistic era].

“‘The storm has died away,’ said Paul Valéry in a lecture at Zurich in 1922, ‘and still we are restless, and uneasy, as if the storm were about to break. Almost all the affairs of men remain in a terrible uncertainty.’ He spoke about all the things that had been injured by the war: economic relations, international affairs, and individual lives. ‘But among all these injured things,’ he stated, ‘is the mind. The mind has indeed been cruelly wounded... it doubts itself profoundly.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Clearness is the first essential”.

Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria according to Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“From the sublime to the ridiculous in a single step.”

Napoleon “with a shrug as he departed Moscow and began the famous retreat after the Russians burned their capital under him”, quoted in Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present

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