“Oh, pshaw! When ya’ can’t have what you choose, ya’ just choose what you have.”
The title character, regarding the food at Col. Cyrus Jones’ eating palace, in Owen Wister The Virginian
In my latest Loonie Politics column I berate Canadian “conservative” politicians for being as clueless about how to avoid wedge issues as they are spineless about how to approach them.
In my latest National Post column I goggle at the sense of entitlement of our Governor General and leftist politicians.
“Dare to be naive.”
R. Buckminster Fuller [emailed by a friend and widely quoted online but I don’t have a precise source].
“there is scarcely anything that could offend me in modern England which is not far more offensive in modern Germany. It is there that these things have had their real success; it is there that they will have their real failure. You may say that Germany leads the modern world. You may, if you like, say that Germany is the modern world. But, if that be so, what is called the modern world is, amid general rejoicings, coming to an end. With all its mirthless cynicism, with all its unmanly militarism, with its sham science and shifty diplomacy, with its excuses for the powerful and its routine for the poor, with its long words of explanation and its very short cuts in conduct, with all its care of the self, and all its carelessness of the soul, what some call the Modern Spirit is cast out of heaven like Lucifer, Son of the Morning. It is cut down to the earth, that did weaken the nations.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News, September 9, 2016, quoted in “GKC on Scripture * Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“TikTok users are loving borzois — the dog breed that perfectly captures our existential dread”
Headline on NBC “Culture Matters” item January 17, 2023
“It is needless to say that the journalists do not always tell the truth about the politicians. What surprises me is that so very often, it would seem, they do not even know the truth about them.”
G. K. Chesterton in New Witness Jan. 28, 1920 quoted in “Chesterton For Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (November-December 2021)
“There is a straight road which runs from Runnymede to Philadelphia. We did not ‘borrow’ provisions from the British Constitution, which had come from the people; those provisions were ours, paid for with the lives of our ancestors on many a battlefield. I have examined the matter. I tell you our Constitution came up from the body of a self-governing people. But we can lose our capacity to govern by its nonexercise.”
Congressman Hatton Sumners of Texas in 1937, quoted in Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World