In my latest National Post column I say “This government doesn’t do hard” could become our new national motto as a vast cast of characters across the executive, legislative and judicial branches avoids thinking about difficult choices from COVID to national security and the budget.
“Together at one side lay a great company of men-at-arms from Semblidac and near them, but apart, horse-archers of Kaheti. Who loves a stranger?”
Wolfram von Eschenbach Parzival
“Revenge really does feel good… The [then just-published] Swiss brain-imaging study reveals how we draw satisfaction from teaching strangers a lesson when they have behaved badly... As the journal Science puts it, the study reveals what goes on in Dirty Harry’s head when ‘he succinctly informs a norm violator that he anticipates deriving satisfaction from inflicting altruistic punishment.’”
Ottawa Citizen August 27, 2004
“Harry Emerson Fosdick says in his book, The Power to See it Through, ‘There is a Scandinavian saying which some of us might well take as a rallying cry for our lives: “The north wind made the Vikings.” Wherever did we get the idea that secure and pleasant living, the absence of difficulty, and the comfort of ease, ever of themselves made people either good or happy? Upon the contrary, people who pity themselves go on pitying themselves even when they are laid softly on a cushion, but always in history character and happiness have come to people in all sorts of circumstances, good, bad, and different, when they shouldered their personal responsibility. So, repeatedly the north wind has made the Vikings.’”
Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“What comes first in intention comes last in execution.”
St. Thomas Aquinas, quoted by Pierre Trudeau in Thomas Axworthy and Pierre Trudeau, eds., Towards a Just Society
“This life in us... however low it flickers or fiercely burns, is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives never so humane and enlightened. To suppose otherwise is to countenance a death-wish. Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.”
Malcolm Muggeridge Something Beautiful for God
“His workers liked to say that he always arrived at meetings in a freshly rumpled suit.”
Luke Sharpe in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #7 (re Leo Burnet, a great adman responsible for all sorts of icons including Tony the Tiger, the Jolly Green Giant, and the Pillsbury Doughboy)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say we can’t tell whether Quebec is “a nation” until we decide what that term means… and while we’re at it maybe we should try to figure out whether Canada still fits the definition.