“For a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs, with strange dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for this place or that baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Frances Farrell in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #8, July/August 2000
“You can critique marriage. Fine. But what game are you going to play? Try coming up with one on your own. Maybe you can. Maybe you’re like avant-garde Picasso, maybe you are, and maybe you have a right to make your own arrangement. Maybe you have the psychological fortitude to craft your own social institution, but I bloody well wouldn’t count on it. You’re lucky that there’s such a thing as a job, or better yet, a career. You’re lucky that there’s such a thing as friendship, as marriage, all of these social institutions. And when you criticize them, Nietzsche put it as one question of conscience, and I think it’s in Twilight of the Idols: Whether you’re a leader, or whether you’re running away, you’re outside the pack and moving in a different direction. In either case, you know, are you a rebel because you can’t fit in? Or are you a rebel because you could fit in, but you see a better way? People in that category are not that common. And the first question of conscience should be, well, ‘Which of those two are you?’ It’s highly probable that you’re the first one, and not the second, because that would mean that you would be intensely disciplined, plus creative on that dimension. Maybe that is you, and God, then we need you. You know, like, you’re an avatar of the savior under those circumstances, and maybe everyone has some of that in them.”
Jordan Peterson in a video clip from “The JBP Show” on Instagram January 18, 2022
“To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings. To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.”
“On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family,” in G.K. Chesterton Brave New Family
“I am unbelievably lucky: a. to be an American; b. To have my wife, the world’s finest human; c. To have never been severely or at least life-threateningly ill; d. To have never been in combat; e. To have had loving, caring, prosperous parents; f. To have an interesting, well-paid career; g. To have great friends, a great sister, nephew, niece, cousins, and, above all, son; h. Above all, to have learned to love and worship a God of love and understanding.”
“Benjamin J. Stein’s Diary” on his 60th birthday in The American Spectator February 2005
In a Loonie Politics piece I should have posted a couple of weeks ago I say it would be instructive to look back at old newspapers to see what did get covered, and how, as opposed to what turned out to matter and why.
“Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation.”
Charles Mackay Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
In my latest National Post column I say the enduring, stomach-churning, decades-long futility of the Toronto Maple Leafs furnishes valuable lessons on how not to succeed in all sorts of areas of life including public policy… if only we could figure out what their secret is.
In my latest Epoch Times column I denounce the Canadian Forces’ proposed plan for military chaplains as an Orwellian project in which uniformity is diversity, exclusion is inclusion and freedom is slavery.