“the ardent haste of the Midnight People, who drink and dance and rattle and are ever afraid to be silent...”
Sinclair Lewis Babbitt
“Think! Thought is man’s prerogative.”
Nayland Smith to narrator Shan Greville, about to do something rash, in Sax Rohmer The Mask of Fu Manchu
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the secretive bungling of basic security at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg is a case study in complacent bad government in Canada.
“The attribute view of personhood – the view that you don’t count as a person, with moral dignity and rights, unless you have such attributes as the ability to make plans and carry them out – is widely deployed in the debates over abortion. But it also carries over into everyday relationships. ‘You must have the attributes we value,’ whatever these may be, for example holding the same opinions, ‘or we treat you like dirt.’”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” April 17, 2023 [https://undergroundthomist.org/antipasto]
“And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination – you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.... Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency.”
Marlow, in Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
“You play for the name on the front of the jersey, not the name on the back of the jersey.”
Boston Celtics hall-of-fame centre Robert Parish (quoted for instance on https://www.bostoncelticshistory.com/item/the-most-from-the-chief/).
“If I kept my mouth shut, I wouldn’t be here.”
The caption beneath a stuffed speckled brown trout mounted on the wall in the office of Robert S. Bennett, a premier Washington lawyer and fixer, according to Bennett’s Washington Post obituary reprinted in the National Post September 18, 2023
In my latest National Post column I ask people who hate Donald Trump why they can’t talk sensibly about important issues until he barges into the conversation.