“I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she’s so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.”
Saki, quoted in Globe & Mail July 17, 2000
“In the enthusiasm of its discoveries the Higher Criticism has applied to the New Testament tests of authenticity so severe that by them a hundred ancient worthies – e.g., Hammurabi, David, Socrates – would fade into legend. Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed – the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus’ arrest, Peter’s denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels. After two centuries of Higher Criticism the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature in the history of Western man.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“Pemmican can be prepared in many ways, and it is not easy to decide which method is the least objectionable. There is rubeiboo and richot, and pemmican plain and pemmican raw, this last method being the one most in vogue among voyageurs; but the richot, to me, seemed the best; mixed with a little flour and fried in a pan, pemmican in this form can be eaten, provided the appetite be sharp and there is nothing else to be had – this last consideration is, however, of importance.”
W.F. Butler The Great Lone Land
“Yet, while former [First World War] soldiers suffered from a high incidence of neurasthenia and sexual impotence, they realized that the war, in the words of Josée Germaine, was ‘the quivering axis of all human history.’ If the war as a whole had no objective meaning, then invariably all human history was telescoped into each man's experience; every person was the sum total of history. Rather than being a social experience, a matter of documentable reality, history was individual nightmare, or even, as the Dadaists insisted, madness. One is again reminded of Nietzsche’s statement, on the very edge of his complete mental collapse, that he was ‘every name in history.’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
In my latest National Post column I express hope that Britain’s National Health Service praising cousin marriage to preemptively placate Islamist immigrants will instead represent a positive turning point as regular people simply refuse to tolerate such idiotic disloyalty and cultural suicide any longer.
In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that when our government warns Communist China not to be as evil as us, they’re the ones being divisive. Which should not be controversial but apparently is.
“Time is not the same for the speaker as for the audience. To the speaker it is too, too brief for what he has to say. For the audience it is a grim foretaste of eternity.”
Marshall McLuhan “‘Culture Without Literacy’/ Explorations 1, 1953”, quoted as X post from The McLuhan Institute March 11, 2025 [https://x.com/McLinstitute/status/1899494456417480991]
“‘ALL ART is propaganda’, wrote George Orwell in 1940, ‘but not all propaganda is art.’”
Start of “Six books you didn’t know were propaganda/ Governments influence a surprising amount of literature. Some of it pretty good” in The Economist Nov. 3, 2023 [https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/11/03/six-books-you-didnt-know-were-propaganda with no byline]