“All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.”
Walt Disney, quoted by Jeff Hayden on Inc. online (www.inc.com/jeff-haden/top-350-inspiring-motivational-quotes-to-tweet-and-share.html)
Re George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman series: “Alfred Knopf said of the first book (and, being the shrewdest of publishers, meant it as a compliment) that he hadn’t heard such a voice in fifty years.”
A writer whose name I failed to record in National Review July 10, 1995
“Man must be taught to see things as symbols – must be trained to use them for effect, and never for themselves. Above all, the door of delight must remain firmly closed.”
Some bright young devil's pitch to Satan at a board meeting in Hell in Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb p. 111 (hence Capon’s imagined “Harry” who on p. 112 refuses noodles with the Chicken Paprikash because he’s counting calories. “There are, to be sure, greater blasphemies than that against the goodness of creation; but none illustrates better the fundamental antimaterialism of the age. Harry sits in front of one of the finest and simplest goods in the world, and he begs off, not because he does not like it, but because he has ceased to see it. Noodles, for him, are not unique and delightful beings; they have become an abstract subject called highly caloric food. No matter to him that Martha made the noodles herself – that he has before him something he will not meet again for years: He turns them down precisely because they are, to him, no matter at all. It is calories, not noodles, that count…. How sad, then, to see real beings – Harry and all his fellow calorie counters – living their lives in abject terror of things that do not even go bump in the night.”
If you enjoy a lively, controversial, definitely counter-consensus take on all kinds of issues, check out Rex Murphy’s new “RexTV” on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZygLRdUzljg
In my latest National Post column I say Banksy bagging $16 million for a “subversive” painting of the British parliament as a bunch of chimpanzees shows the debased state of our culture that helps explain the debased state of our politics.
"the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”
T.S. Eliot quoted in Daniel Boorstin The Genius of American Politics