In my latest National Post column I celebrate Meghan Markle’s pregnancy as the sort of happy thing we need more of in the world, our lives and the newspapers.

“Such reactions [seeing only the enormous good or bad potential of a new technology] are amplified by what might be termed chronocentricity – the egotism that one’s own generation is posed on the very cusp of history. Today, we are repeatedly told that we are in the midst of a communications revolution. But the electric telegraph was, in many ways, far more disconcerting...”

Epilogue in Tom Standage The Victorian Internet

“It is a sign of sharp sickness in a society when it is actually led by some special sort of lunatic.”

G.K. Chesterton in "The Miser and His Friends" in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed, and Other Essays (emailed by a friend)

“The workmanship surpassed the material…”

Apollo’s palace, decorated by Vulcan, described in the Phaeton story in Thomas Bulfinch, Mythology of Greece and Rome

“the belief of French poststructuralism, exemplified by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, that the ‘subject’ – the thinking, single agent, the ‘I’ of every sentence, was an illusion: all you had left was language, not mentality… Once there were writers, but now there is only what Foucault derisively called ‘the author function.’”

Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint

“It is natural to civilised man to go back upon his past, and to be grateful for all profit he can gain from the study of his own development. So we may be certain that the claim of Greece and Rome to our eternal gratitude will never cease to be asserted, and their right to teach us still what we could have learnt nowhere else will never be successfully disputed.”

W. Warde Fowler, Rome (written November 1911)

"Talent does what it can; genius does what it must."

Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) [the guy who also said "the pen is mightier than the sword" and started a novel "It was a dark and stormy night"]
 

"With God dead, there remains only history and power."

“Helen’s Exile” in Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays