In my latest Epoch Times column I say the big problem with Canada’s federal ethics commissioner isn’t the Liberals making a mockery of the post, it’s that we’re trying to substitute technical expertise for character.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
English novelist L.P. Hartley, quoted in Sylvan Barnet’s “Overview” in the 1986 Signet Classic edition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar [in Policy Options November 2002 historian Desmond Morton called him “an otherwise obscure English novelist”].
“The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
William Morris, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email teaser August 20, 2022
“Meanderthal: A person who walks particularly slowly and aimlessly, often toting cellphones and delaying pedestrian or motor traffic.”
“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail January 6, 2006
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
Henry Ford on the witness stand in 1919 during his libel suit against the Chicago Tribune, quoted in Clifton Fadiman, ed., The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes [which as I may have complained before was in fact big and blue]. These words are the apparently origin of his supposed “History is bunk”, and I quote them not because I agree but on the contrary because they embodies a typical progressive fatuity that nothing ever mattered before yet what we do can matter by sheer force of will... and because I want to add that in The Illusion of Technique William Barrett quoted it as “History is the bunk”, which I find interesting because older uses of that term invariably seem to have it as “the bunk” and if anyone knows how or why it got shortened or what the original reference even was I would be interested.
In my latest Mercatornet article I say that what matters in the upcoming U.S. election is not what the people involved would have you focus on.
“Carissimi, when praised for the ease and grace of his melodies, exclaimed, ‘Ah! you little know with what difficulty this ease has been acquired.’ Sir Joshua Reynolds, when once asked how long it had taken him to paint a certain picture, replied, ‘All my life.’”
Samuel Smiles Self-Help
“It is the peasants who preserve all traditions of the sites of battles or the building of churches. It is they who remember, so far as anyone remembers, the glimpses of fairies or the graver wonders of saints. In the classes above them the supernatural has been slain by the supercilious. That is a true and tremendous text in Scripture which says that ‘where there is no vision the people perish.’ But it is equally true in practice that where there is no people the visions perish.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News, July 30, 1910, quoted in “GKC on Scripture – Conducted by Peter Floriani” “Proverbs Part 2” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the G.K. Chesterton Society Vol. 25 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2022)