In my latest National Post column I say John Le Carré’s novels were morally rotten and dangerous in practice.
“We need metaphors of magic and monsters in order to understand the human condition.”
Stephen Donaldson, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 25, 2007 [to which I add “Yes, but why?”]
“Leisure is a food, like sleep; liberty is a food, like sleep. Leisure is a matter of quality rather than quantity. Five minutes lasts longer when one cannot be disturbed than five hours when one maybe disturbed.”
G.K. Chesterton “On Holidays”, from New Witness May 21, 1914 in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #7 (June 2008)
In my latest National Post column I say the outrageous way the Chinese government speaks about the outrageous things it does is a red flag about the outrageous way it thinks.
“it is not probable that a man who is careless in small matters is careful in large ones; quite the contrary, a man who cannot even copy a sentence of Keynes’s correctly is not likely to be a reliable reporter of complicated or badly expressed ideas.”
George Stigler "On Scientific Writing” in The Intellectual and the Market Place and Other Essays [in support of a proposal that someone undertake a large-scale random verification of statements of empirical fact and of quotations from other writers in published economic articles]
“He shall die a flea’s death.”
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
“Tourism was the source of history’s original failure of cultural understanding. Cyril Aldred writes that ancient Greek and Roman vacationers in Egypt ‘never really understood Egyptian religion and were inclined to see in inexplicable acts and beliefs a more profound significance than actually existed.’ Thus the concept of the ‘inscrutable Orient,’ the idea of the ‘mysterious East.’”
P.J. O’Rourke in The Atlantic Monthly September 2002
“Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one’s uniqueness, one falls in love with one’s complexity.”
John Fowles in Daniel Martin Chapter 2 according to en.wikiquote.org [a friend had cited a slightly different version from memory at a dinner].