"I am put in mind of a little book, titled Manners, that my own grandmother gave me as a child…. printed in 1912…. which I have sadly misplaced… good for a laugh when I was a teenager…. It was a noble little book, as I came to see later…. Implicit within every statement in the book was a conception of civilization, an aspiration to raise ourselves up. Not simply to ‘get ahead,’ but to rise out of the slovenly condition of being barbaric."

David Warren in Ottawa Citizen April 9, 2002 [reflecting on Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother]

“In Mr. Arcand’s film [Les Invasions Barbares], there are many suggestions that, like Rome, our culture has become decadent enough to be vulnerable to barbarians, however unworthy they may be. Most barbarians have the vigour of their appetites, if not the courage of their convictions. The barbarians who savaged America on 9/11 had the courage of their convictions, too."

William Thorsell in Globe & Mail August 30, 2004

"Half his power lay in a conciliating trick of sinking the commander in the leader."

E.W. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman gentleman thief

“Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the birthday of Victor Hugo. Mr. William Archer does not sing carols descriptive of the infancy of Ibsen outside people’s doors in the snow…. The strange truth about the matter is told in the very word ‘holiday.’… It is hard to see at first sight why so human a thing as leisure and larkiness should always have a religious origin. Rationally there appears no reason why we should not sing and give each other presents in honour of anything--the birth of Michael Angelo or the opening of Euston Station.  But it does not work. As a fact, men only become greedily and gloriously material about something spiritualistic."

G.K. Chesterton Heretics

"Et ce n’est pas important la guerre des moutons et des fleurs?"

The prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Le Petit Prince