In my latest Epoch Times column I say it’s time to take a frank look at what worked and what didn’t in our response to SARS-CoV-2, with the “shut up and mask” consensus that no one should ask questions in a crisis definitely in the latter category.
“The best doctors in the world, are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.”
Jonathan Swift, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (though Carnegie says Swift himself was “the most devastating pessimist in English literature” so not prone to taking his own advice on cheerfulness and health).
“Mick Jagger told me that the lines on his face were laughter lines, but nothing is that funny.”
British jazz singer George Melly, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail August 4, 2005
On May 20 I discussed Israel, COVID, liberty and more with Richard Syrett on NewsTalk Sauga 960 AM.
“But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
The king of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
“How thinkest thou that I rule this people? I have but a regiment of guards to do my bidding, therefore it is not by force. It is by terror. My empire is of the imagination. Once in a generation mayhap I do as I have done but now, and slay a score by torture.”
“She” (to the narrator) in H. Rider Haggard She
“He noticed that his human brothers lacked his discrimination of time and often were forced to wait faster than a Martian would…”
Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
“He looks like he swallowed a safe.”
An ESPN commentator on the St. John’s basketball team’s very solidly built guard Matt Brust, February 2, 1987