“travel narrows the mind.”
This quotation has been widely attributed or claimed but as far as I can determine it originated with G.K. Chesterton in his book about his 1921 trip to America; it is that source that was quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004)
In my latest National Post column, part of the paper’s “Serious Canada” series, I list the things a nation serious about its finances would do, and warn of the consequences if we don’t.
“I suppose the terrible thing about humiliation is the certainty that one is indeed a proper object of ridicule. While it is happening we can’t feel that it will pass, that it’s only a wretched moment.”
Denis Donoghue in his autobiography Warrenpoint (based on a conversation between Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot) quoted by Irving Howe in The New Republic March 11, 1991
“Watching [Nick] Faldo and [Curtis] Strange is like watching two glaciers at work.”
TV announcer re the Ryder Cup on Sunday July 24, 1995, 17th hole
“‘The idea that going to the beach was good for you was a creation of 18th-century Britain,’ writes Charles Leadbeater in Prospect magazine. ‘Entrepreneurs keen to promote an alternative to the spa hit upon the idea that immersing people in cold salty water might be healthy. One of the first recorded bathing expeditions took to the North Sea at Scarborough in 1627. A century later, a string of seaside alternatives to the spas at Bath and Buxton were well established. Before that, beaches had been regarded as hostile places, at best a working space for people who made their living from the sea: fishermen, smugglers, wreckers. Swimming for pleasure, and sunbathing, were unheard of.’”
“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail September 15, 2004
In my latest Mercatornet article I ask people who call themselves rational and civil to look at COVID-19 through some less politicized and more edifying lens than boo hiss down with Trump.