In my latest National Post column I say the WE scandal must not put us to sleep with its characteristically Canadian dull murkiness.

“Every activity has its own specific goal. Pleasure very probably ensues in most cases when this goal is reached, but that is a different matter.”

I.A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism

“Marvellous, old cock! I never realized Malvolio could be played as a bore.”

“what Lawrence Olivier once wickedly said to Alec Guinness” according to Tom Carson in The Atlantic Monthly September 2004

“For they [John Smith’s audience] did believe in the spirit of the devil which, as everyone knows, is in all of us.”

Walter Lippman The Public Philosophy

In my latest National Post column I say apologies are nice, at least some of them, but what really matters is whether like Scrooge the person who claims to see the error of their ways leads a different life afterward.

“In another illustration of dwarfed ambition, Whitby bills itself as ‘Durham’s Business Centre.’”

Christie Blatchford in National Post November 25, 2000

“Ain’t no sense worryin’ about things you got no control over ‘cause, if you ain’t got no control over ‘em, ain’t no sense worryin’. And it ain’t no sense worryin’ about things you got control over ‘cause, if you got control over ‘em, ain’t no sense worryin’.”

U.S. baseball player Mickey Rivers, quoted in The Write File Quarterly Issue #5, Summer 1995

"That is the worst idea... since Abraham Lincoln said, ‘I'm sick of kicking around the house all day, let's go take in a show.’"

Edmund Blackadder in Black Adder Goes Forth [it turns out he actually called it “the worst idea in the history of entertainment” according to https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0526713/characters/nm0000100 - such are the perils of checking quotations].