“suddenly, sex is something we chat about at Starbucks, while God is something we read about by flashlight under the covers.”
Dahlia Lithwick in Ottawa Citizen October 24, 1999
“Salt: An Epicure’s Delight”, “Classic Wines of Estonia”, “Flemish Weaving the Traditional Way”.
The in-flight magazine articles the characters use to sedate themselves in Red Dwarf “Dimension Jump” (the Ace Rimmer episode).
“the only serious reason which I can imagine inducing any one person to listen to any other is, that the first person looks to the second person with an ardent faith and a fixed attention, expecting him to say what he does not expect him to say…. clearly it is quite true that whenever we go to hear a prophet or teacher we may or may not expect wit, we may or may not expect eloquence, but we do expect what we do not expect. We may not expect the true, we may not even expect the wise, but we do expect the unexpected. If we do not expect the unexpected, why do we go there at all? If we expect the expected, why do we not sit at home and expect it by ourselves?”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics
In my latest Epoch Times column I wax nostalgic about the days when people pretended they’d read books I didn’t want to, instead of admitting they don’t read.
“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.”
Seneca Epistulae Morales #71 section 3 quoted (among many other places) by https://libquotes.com/seneca/quote/lbt5f6w
In my latest Loonie Politics column I ask why the legacy media are so reticent about covering suicide but so keen to report all the lurid details on (American) mass shootings
“The Master said, ‘Men of antiquity studied to improve themselves; men today study to impress others.’”
Confucius Analects XIV.24
In my latest Epoch Times column I say people arguing over whether government in Canada is “broken” should devise a checklist of the attributes of a genuinely broken government and then see how many of them we’ve got.