“My [Houyhnhnm] master … said, a fancy would sometimes take a Yahoo to retire into a corner, to lie down, and howl, and groan, and spurn away all that came near him, although he were young and fat, wanted neither food nor water, nor did the servant imagine what could possibly ail him. And the only remedy they found was, to set him to hard work, after which he would infallibly come to himself. To this I was silent out of partiality to my own kind; yet here I could plainly discover the true seeds of spleen, which only seizes on the lazy, the luxurious, and the rich; who, if they were forced to undergo the same regimen, I would undertake for the cure.”

Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels

In my latest Loonie Politics column I praise John Tory for finding the honour to resign as mayor of Toronto, and mean it the second time, instead of denying that character had any relevance to politics like most of those commenting on the affair or whispering or yelling in his ear

“But my time and labour was little worth, and so it was as well employed one way as another.”

Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the New York Times may be thrilled by elite cultural phenomena like vegan mattresses and sound baths coming out of California. But normal people are more worried about disorder, depravity and crime spread by “Do what thou wilt” elite attitudes run amok.

“As for Martin, he was firmly persuaded that a man is badly off wherever he is, so he suffered in patience.”

Voltaire Candide

“10 floors of basement.”

Then Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022 describing the HUD building in Washington DC designed by Bauhaus school architect Marcel Breuer.

“Garth could go through the 24-hour flu in eight hours.”

“An acquaintance of [Garth] Drabinsky’s” on his “hurry to succeed” according to Peter C. Newman in Maclean’s February 1, 1999

“Sex… is really a very solemn act; For it is the foundation of all we call the family and all we know as human society. Some groping in these dark beginnings have said that mankind was once under a matriarchy; I suppose that under a matriarchy it would not be called mankind but womankind. But others have conjectured that what is called matriarchy was simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remained fixed because all the fathers were fugitive and irresponsible. Then came the moment when the man decided to guard and guide what he had created. So he became the head of the family, not as a bully with a big club to beat women with, but rather as a respectable person trying to be a responsible person. Now all that might be perfectly true, and might even have been the first family act, and it would still be true that man then for the first time acted like a man, and therefore the for the first time became fully a man.”

G.K. Chesterton in “Professors and Prehistoric Men” in The Everlasting Man, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)