“We decided the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.’”
Kevin Avram, founder of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, quoted in British Columbia Report Feb. 8, 1993 [specifically regarding their approach to fighting taxes but obviously it applies to life far more broadly]
“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].
“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].
In my latest Loonie Politics column I ask why, if things are so bad in the United States, it remains the indispensable nation and why Donald Trump, for all his glaring defects, remains better than so many of his rivals and critics, including in apparently securing the control over Greenland everyone ridiculed him for.
“People are most often of two basic types – those who always have an excellent reason why they are not able to do something, and those who always get their tasks done, somehow.”
Martin Anderson Revolution
“IN THE ENORMOUS BATTLE FOR THE HEARTS AND MINDS AND SOULS OF OUR CHILDREN, the modern education system has all the advantages of size, reach, funding, compulsion, and control. That system includes both public and private schools that operate alike and madly follow the latest fads and fashions and fallacies and offer less and less of the timeless truths. We can look around and see the devastating results everywhere: a populace with little literacy, no reasoning skills, no moral compass, no knowledge of the past, no appreciation for our cultural accomplishments, no common sense. They are glued to screens, awed by vapid celebrities, and stuck in dead-end jobs as wage slaves. They are wobbly and depressed, but also angry and inarticulate. They think in fragments, they talk in fragments. They are the product of our nation’s education system. But the thing about Goliath is that he is made to be toppled. The thing about David, who will defeat him, is that he sings songs unto the Lord.”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023) [including start].
“The world seems to be divided into people who are always doing something and people who are never doing anything.”
One of mine, from Feb. 26, 1989.
“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]