“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”
Charlie Chaplin, quoted in Globe & Mail March 24, 1999
“by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung 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
In my latest National Post column I call for environmental action at the yard level, allowing a micro “rewilding” return of nature to our cities in the form of flowers, bugs, birds and healthy soil.
“L’humilité n’est souvent qu’une feinte soumission, dont on se sert pour soumettre les autres; c’est un artifice de l’orgueil qui s’abaisse pour s’élever; et bien qu’il se transforme en mille manières, il n’est jamais mieux déguisé et plus capable de tromper que lorsqu’il se cache sous la figure de l’humilité.”
Réflexions morales #254 in La Rochefoucauld Maximes
“Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which other thoughts are drained.”
“Robert Bloch, the screenwriter of the movie Psycho” quoted by John Ivison in National Post June 19, 2004
“In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it. This is because there is nothing that can take its place.”
“That the weak overcomes the strong/ And the submissive overcomes the hard/ Everyone in the world knows yet no one can put/ This knowledge into practice.”
Lao Tzu II.LXXVIII.186-187
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the idea of national strategies where governments reform citizens is bad, including if one targets “Islamophobia”.
“There are four varieties in society: the lovers, the ambitious, observers and fools. The fools are the happiest.”
“Hippolyte Taine French critic and historian (1828-93)” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail Feb. 20, 2013