Walter Pater’s “Renaissance, Oscar Wilde told his friend William Butler Yeats, was his own ‘golden book… the very flower of decadence.’ Pater’s aestheticism, however – the cultivation of experience, sensuality, passion, the exotic – although possessing an obvious affinity to the decadents, had a high seriousness, even an ultimate sense of morality, that was lacking in the decadents.”
Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say those who sweep aside the rule of law through vandalism, personal violence and other forms of “direct action”, regardless of their cause and its legitimacy, have succumbed to the deadly sin of pride.
“I could, perhaps, like others, have astonished thee with strange improbable tales; but I rather chose to relate plain matter of fact… because my principal design was to inform, and not to amuse thee…. a traveller’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad, as well as good, example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.”
Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
“Jack Cohen (a science writer and reproductive biologist), defined mankind not so much as Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but as Pan Narrans – the story-telling ape.”
John Thompson and Joe Turlej Other People’s Wars
“Hasten slowly.”
Suetonius, quoted in Patrick Hughes and George Brecht, Vicious Circles and Infinity
In my latest National Post column I express the desire that Erin O’Toole base policy on principles and explain it in terms of them.
“A child is born into a world of phenomena, all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs – it sucks – it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start were they ever magnetized at all – just those particular moments of experience and no others – I don’t know. And nor does anyone else.”
The psychologist in Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, quoted by “Teller” (I believe my note to myself on this source means the author was Raymond Joseph Teller of “Penn and Teller”) in The Atlantic Monthly June 2001