In my latest Loonie Politics column I take aim at the 20th-anniversary Harper revisionist rationalizations that he never intended to implement conservative policies, just build a winning party… which he didn’t even do anyway.
“The statistician is trying to make a rigid and unchangeable chain out of elastic links.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News July 23, 1927, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“Now this modern refusal to undo what has been done is not only an intellectual fault; it is a moral fault also. It is not merely our mental inability to understand the mistake we have made. It is also our spiritual refusal to admit that we have made a mistake.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted in stand-alone box without further attribution in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“Apparently, I must give you a lecture. I grimaced neither at your impudence nor at your sentiment, but at your diction and style. I condemn clichés, especially those that have been corrupted by fascists and communists. Such phrases as ‘great and noble cause’ and ‘fruits of their labour’ have been given an ineradicable stink by Hitler and Stalin and all their vermin brood. Besides, in this century of the overwhelming triumph of science, the appeal of the cause of human freedom is no longer that it is great and noble; it is more or less than that; it is essential. It is no greater or nobler than the cause of edible food or the cause of effective shelter. Man must have freedom or he will cease to exist as man. The despot, whether fascist or communist, is no longer restricted to such puny tools as the heel or the sword or even the machine gun; science has provided him weapons that can give him the planet; and only men who are willing to die for freedom have any chance of living for it.’”
Nero Wolfe to his adopted daughter for being reckless and romantic not practical in fighting for liberty in Rex Stout The Black Mountain
Having been called an Optimist in his youth because of his opposition to fashionable youth pessimism “after naturally enjoying the daylight, I came to be troubled with the twilight…. All that there is, in substance, on the other side, is a row of official optimists, boasting of the liberties they have not got, and defending the religion they do not believe.”
G.K. Chesterton somewhere in G.K’s Weekly Vol. 22 (3/10/35 to 12/3/36) quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #3 (Jan./Feb. 2025)
“It may be a strange sight to see the blind leading the blind; but England provides a stranger. England shows us the blind leading the people who can see. And this again is an under-statement of the case.”
G.K. Chesterton in “A Glimpse of my Country” in Tremendous Trifles, quoted in “The Golden Key Chain GKC on Scripture Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)
In my latest National Post column I say the Canadian state has become so profoundly incapable that when politicians and bureaucrats don’t do something they claimed they were going to, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether they didn’t want to, couldn’t, or both.
“Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.”
“Doug Larson (English middle-distance runner who won gold medals at the 1924 Olympic Games)”, emailed without further attribution by a friend