“ONE CAN LACK any of the qualities of an organizer – with one exception – and still be accepted and successful. That exception is the art of communication. It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people. In that event you are not even a failure. You're just not there.”
Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [start of chapter “Communication”].
In my latest Loonie Politics column I denounce the Canadian habit of putting up with meaningless rhetoric from politicians with nonsensical jobs.
“Such, in brief, is the Platonic doctrine of Forms or Ideas, but this summary can give no impression of the depths and riches of Plato’s thought and in particular takes no account of another and a very important aspect in which an emotional, one had almost said a mystical, value is found in the striving of the human soul towards an attainment of the perfection seen in the Form, such as that of Beauty.”
David Knowles The Evolution of Medieval Thought [and by no means his only use of the surely peak-pomposity phrase “one had almost said”]
“She means well, but she doesn’t mean much.”
“CAN’T FIND WHO SAID IT FIRST” quoted in “Other Suspects – V” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“To paraphrase Japanese Emperor Hirohito after the detonation of two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, in the light of this week’s events, it is time for the ‘unthinkable.’ (The Japanese emperor acknowledged that the war had not gone ‘entirely as we had hoped.’)”
Conrad Black in National Post June 28, 2025 [re Gaza and Iran]
“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
“rapid unscheduled disassembly”
The preferred SpaceX euphemism for a rocket that blows up, quoted in National Post May 29, 2025
In my latest Epoch Times column, a New Year’s look ahead, I said if we can’t get politicians to resolve to stop talking nonsense in 2026, we can at least determine that we ourselves won’t pretend they’re not… even if they’re on “our side”.