“Clearness is the first essential”.
Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria according to Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“Time is not the same for the speaker as for the audience. To the speaker it is too, too brief for what he has to say. For the audience it is a grim foretaste of eternity.”
Marshall McLuhan “‘Culture Without Literacy’/ Explorations 1, 1953”, quoted as X post from The McLuhan Institute March 11, 2025 [https://x.com/McLinstitute/status/1899494456417480991]
“‘ALL ART is propaganda’, wrote George Orwell in 1940, ‘but not all propaganda is art.’”
Start of “Six books you didn’t know were propaganda/ Governments influence a surprising amount of literature. Some of it pretty good” in The Economist Nov. 3, 2023 [https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/11/03/six-books-you-didnt-know-were-propaganda with no byline]
“Her [Rome’s] language became, by a most admirable corruption, the speech of Italy, Rumania, France, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America; half the white man’s world speaks a Latin tongue. Latin was, till the 18th century, the Esperanto of science, scholarship, and philosophy in the West; it gave a convenient international terminology to botany and zoology; it survives in the sonorous ritual and official documents of the Roman Church; it still writes medical prescriptions, and haunts the phraseology of the law. It entered by direct appropriation, and again through the romance languages (regalis, regal, royal; paganus, pagan, peasant), to enhance the wealth and flexibility of English speech. Our Roman heritage works in our lives a thousand times a day.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“Nigel Farage stood up in the House of Commons yesterday to ask how many British troops will be promised to Ukraine. A reasonable question. He was dismissed as being a ‘Putin apologist’ by both Conservatives and Labour. The uniparty are still two cheeks of the same ugly old arse.”
A post on X from someone I am not familiar with on March 4, 2025 [https://x.com/darrengrimes_/status/1896864773389869349] and yes, it bends my rule about vulgarity in public discourse but it’s funny and apposite enough to deserve it.
“One basket had very good figs, even like the figs that are first ripe: and the other basket had very naughty figs, which could not be eaten, they were so bad.”
Jeremiah 24:2 [King James Bible]
“Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly”
Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria quoted in Will Durant Caesar and Christ
In my latest Loonie Politics column I use the stream of meaningless vainglorious press releases from the G7 summit to indicate the trap our political class has fallen into, becoming so good at soothing vapouring that it has become a habit of mind rather than merely of tongue.