“One can always tell when one is getting old and serious by the way that holidays seem to interfere with one’s work.”
“Bob Edwards in the Calgary Eye Opener, 1913” quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail August 5, 2002
“We have to realize that the child’s world is without economic purpose. A child doesn’t understand – happy ignorance – that people are paid to do things. To a child the policeman rules the street for self-important majesty; the furnace man stokes the furnace because he loves the noise of falling coal and the fun of getting dirty; the grocer is held to his counter by the lure of aromatic spices and the joy of giving. And in this very ignorance there is a grain of truth. The child’s economic world may be the one that we are reaching out in vain to find. Here is a path in the wood of economics that some day might be followed to new discovery. Meantime, the children know it well and gather beside it their flowers of beautiful illusion.”
“War-Time Santa Claus” in Stephen Leacock On the Front Line of Life
“Travel, in the true sense, has become impossible in the large urban or urbanised district. All such places are alike, plastered with the same advertisements, blocked up with the same big shops, selling the same newspapers, attending the same schools.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Oct. 2, 1926, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 # 3 (Dec. 2001)
In my latest National Post column I say Terry Corcoran’s old jibe about “Unionland” remains all too pertinent as organized labour tries to drag what’s left of the private sector into the public sector mess it has done much to create.
“When you do policy, you have to allow for people.”
“David Rose, a research adviser at the Bank of Canada” quoted in Maclean’s October 23, 1995 (both Rose and Maclean's evidently considered it a revolutionary insight in economics).
“There is no limit to the amount of nonsense one can produce if you think too long alone.”
Jacob Viner, quoted by Bernard J. Shapiro, Principal, McGill University, to the Empire Club of Canada, Toronto, May 22, 1997, in Canadian Speeches Vol. XI, #4 (July/August 1997)
“The alternative to perfection of self is perfection of others: Either I will concentrate on me and my welfare or on others and their welfare; in other words, mind my own business or mind other people’s business.”
Leonard Read Let Freedom Reign