Something has been “making you behave as if we were distant acquaintances and you were trying to increase the distance.”
One of the characters in P.G. Wodehouse Do Butlers Burgle Banks?
In my latest National Post column I say when the rule of law no longer applies either to the powerful or to the mob it’s not social justice or any other kind.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say we can have a happy Canada Day if we’re sensible about history and human nature.
“Nearly all the most awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable, from ‘A child is born’ to ‘A soul is damned.’ If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?… Only the mass of men, for instance, have authority to say whether life is good. Whether life is good is an especially mystical and delicate question, and, like all such questions, is asked in words of one syllable. It is also answered in words of one syllable, and Bernard Shaw (as also mankind) answers ‘yes.’”
G.K. Chesterton, “Shaw, The Philosopher,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure: It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
Oscar Wilde quoted in Filip Palda The History of Tobacco Regulation: Forward to the Past
“‘what will always be discovered by a diligent and impartial inquirer, that wherever human nature is to be found, there is a mixture of vice and virtue, a contest of passion and reason…’”
Samuel Johnson quoted in D.J. Enright’s introduction to Samuel Johnson The History of Rasselas
“Eventually Richard [III] comes to understand, if not consciously at first, that he was programming himself as a loser, and has thrown himself into the elegiac role of one who has lost his throne before he has actually lost it.”
Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare
In my latest Loonie Politics column I lament the hypnotic post-modern incoherence of Trudeau’s simultaneous insistence that he knows borrowing is harmless and can’t do a fiscal update because the future is uncertain.