“The history of mankind is an immense sea of errors in which a few obscure truths may here and there be found.”
Cesare de Beccaria (a.k.a. Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio), quoted in Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle
In my latest National Post column I explain how anyone who actually wants to have a sensible conversation on guns not a shouting match, or a virtue-signalling festival, could go about it.
“After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickedness in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them. It is no good for Quakers, or any other body of men to uplift their voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they don’t follow their own precepts. Every soul of them is doing his own piece of fighting, somehow and somewhere. The world might be a better world without fighting, for anything I know, but it wouldn’t be our world; and therefore I am dead against crying peace when there is no peace, and isn’t meant to be. I am as sorry as any man to see folk fighting the wrong people and wrong things, but I’d a deal sooner see them doing that, than that they should have no fight in them.”
Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays
“You sit in the park and you watch the grass die... /You ask how I know of Toledo, Ohio/ Well I spent a week there one day/ They’ve got entertainment to dazzle your eyes/ Go visit the bakery and watch the buns rise”
John Denver “Toledo” quoted on the Wall St. Journal’s “OpinionJournal” Jan. 15, 2003
“The situation is not as bad as it seems – it’s worse.”
A Greek Olympic official quoted in Maclean’s July 7, 2000
In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that the painfully visible vulnerability of our electric grid is due to politicians and bureaucrats who increasingly think we should be grateful that they let us pay high prices for lousy infrastructure and other public services.
“when I opened the door [into his own office] and walked into the musty silence of the little waiting room there was the usual feeling of having been dropped down a well dried up twenty years ago to which no one would come back ever. The smell of old dust hung in the air as flat and stale as a football interview.”
Raymond Chandler The Little Sister
“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
C.S. Lewis, quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts