“The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when no one else is watching.”
“Anson Dorrance (1951-), coach of women’s soccer at the University of North Carolina” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail October 27, 2011
“Well, if that’s what you call being at peace, for heaven’s sake just warn me before you go to war, will you?”
The main character in Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
In my latest National Post column I say it’s important to stand up for ourselves and our values over Ukraine without blundering, or sauntering, into a nuclear war… and if you think it’s hard, congratulations, you’re a grownup who realizes reality is tricky.
“For to feel oneself a martyr, as everybody knows, is a pleasurable thing, and the true tragedy of my position was that I had passed that stage. I had enjoyed what sweets it had to offer in ever dwindling degree since the middle of August…”
Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands
“Boys will quarrel, and when they quarrel will sometimes fight. Fighting with fists is the natural and English way for English boys to settle their quarrels. What substitute for it is there, or ever was there, amongst any nation under the sun? What would you like to see take its place?”
Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays
“What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth…”
John Keats, quoted in I.A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism
In my latest Loonie Politics column I advocate thinking about things you don’t want to think about, from Putin’s motives to Xi Jinping’s ideology to James Burnham’s warning about the “Suicide of the West”.
“It may be that a free society as we have known it carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends.”
Friedrich Hayek “The Intellectuals and Socialism”