“It was Macaulay who remarked that it was not pleasant to live in times about which it was exciting to read.”
Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
“Says a passage in the Talmud” according to Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say if heads don’t roll over the latest revelations from the Mass Casualty Commission then we have pretty much given up on truth and decency.
“Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.”
Iris Murdoch, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail October 4, 2002
“If you don’t knit, bring a book.”
“Dorothy Parker’s advice” for surviving something terminally dull, quoted by John Ivison in National Post February 22, 2005
In a Loonie Politics piece I should have posted a couple of weeks ago I say it would be instructive to look back at old newspapers to see what did get covered, and how, as opposed to what turned out to matter and why.
“As to fighting, keep out of it if you can, by all means. When the time comes, if it ever should, that you have to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a challenge to fight, say ‘No’ if you can – only take care you make it clear to yourselves why you say ‘No.’ It’s a proof of the highest courage, if done from true Christian motives. It’s quite right and justifiable, if done from a simple aversion to physical pain and danger. But don’t say ‘No’ because you fear a licking, and say or think it’s because you fear God, for that’s neither Christian nor honest. And if you do fight, fight it out; and don’t give in while you can stand and see.”
Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays
“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