In my latest National Post column I warn that because ideas have consequences, and a powerful internal logic, progressive organizations that start with apparently non-controversial causes tend to slide into radical craziness, as with Ottawa’s Capital Pride that’s being boycotted even by Justin Trudeau because it’s so pro-Hamas and can’t stop itself.
“When it [Queen’s University] opened its first classes in 1842, its first professor, the Reverend Peter Colin Campbell, taught classical literature. In its Memorial Room to the school’s war dead, there is an inscription around the wall, from Wordsworth, another provocative conditional: ‘We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold which Milton held.’”
Joseph Brean in National Post January 26, 2024 [heckling the way Queen’s was handling its funding crisis].
“A dreadful rumour as to an engagement which had been one of its [some party’s] accursed fruits tormented me with the fresh certainty that I had not been missed, and bred in me that most desolating brand of cynicism which is produced by defeat through insignificance.”
Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands
“and if there be some harder, better way to salvation than to follow that which we believe to be good, then we are all damned.”
Lord Dunsany, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley
“The history of mankind is the history of ideas.”
Ludwig von Mises Planned Chaos [1st sentence of “The Liberation of the Demons”]
“The whole conscious and subconscious trend of modernism is the distrust, and even the detestation, of the ordinary man.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness March 9, 1916, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“Charlemagne receives a buffet that goes near to bring him down: the voice of St Gabriel, rallying him, has that tart stringency which distinguishes the Divine word from pious vapourings: ‘And what’, said he, ‘art thou about, great King?’”
Dorothy L. Sayers’ introduction to The Song of Roland
“It’s just a stage you’re going through.”
Me c. August 2000 if an actor falls through a trap door or steps on a rotten board during a performance.