In my latest National Post column I object to politicians’ stream of petty dishonesty about anniversaries, events and rituals that numbs us to and implicates us in their constant deceit on big things as well.
“We have to realize that the child’s world is without economic purpose. A child doesn’t understand – happy ignorance – that people are paid to do things. To a child the policeman rules the street for self-important majesty; the furnace man stokes the furnace because he loves the noise of falling coal and the fun of getting dirty; the grocer is held to his counter by the lure of aromatic spices and the joy of giving. And in this very ignorance there is a grain of truth. The child’s economic world may be the one that we are reaching out in vain to find. Here is a path in the wood of economics that some day might be followed to new discovery. Meantime, the children know it well and gather beside it their flowers of beautiful illusion.”
“War-Time Santa Claus” in Stephen Leacock On the Front Line of Life
“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
Aldous Huxley, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail February 23, 2011
“More haste, less speed”
Pandar to Troilus in Chaucer Troilus and Criseyde (of course in the translation... by Gollum among others).
“The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Roman Converts” in Dublin Review, January/March 1925, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #8 (July/August 2001)
“They were like cockroaches. It wasn’t what they ate or carried off, it was what they fell into and ruined.”
Bob Uecker and Mickey Herskowitz Catcher in the Wry (re losing to the hapless New York Mets in 1964)
“Travel, in the true sense, has become impossible in the large urban or urbanised district. All such places are alike, plastered with the same advertisements, blocked up with the same big shops, selling the same newspapers, attending the same schools.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Oct. 2, 1926, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 # 3 (Dec. 2001)