“The excitement never starts around here.”
Me on May 6, 2025 (to our dog, who was apparently expecting something marvellous to happen mid-morning on a Thursday while I struggled to get to my email).
“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”
Carl Sandburg, quoted in a C2C email teaser June 27, 2025 to an article that did not actually contain that quotation [https://c2cjournal.ca/2025/06/restoring-canada-special-seriespart-vi-the-desperate-need-for-a-baby-bump/].
“The way taxes are you might as well marry for love.”
Janice Page quoted in “Other Suspects I Quotes not by GKC” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)
In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that decades of immigration and investment policy based on mistaken and incoherent multiculturalism is predictably turning Canada into a low-trust society.
“Though he [Nero] came quite early in Roman Imperial history and was followed by many austere and noble emperors, yet for us the Roman Empire was never quite cleansed of that memory of the sexual madman. The populace or barbarians from whom we come could not forget the hour when they came to the highest place of the earth, saw the huge pedestal of the earthly omnipotence, read on it Divus Caesar, and looked up and saw a statue without a head.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution in “News with Views” “Compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025) [in context of the North Hertfordshire Museum announcing that it would refer to Elagabalus as she-her].
“My taste is for the sensational novel, the detective story, the story about death, robbery, and secret societies; a taste which I share in common with the bulk at least of the male population of this world.”
G.K. Chesterton “Novel-Reading” in T.P.’s Weekly April 7, 1911, reprinted in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)
“Nobody told me that when you get a husband, the ears are sold separately.”
Graphic emailed by a friend without attribution
“of all the war books of the late twenties... Remarque’s [phenomenally successfull All Quiet on the Western Front] made its point, that his was a truly lost generation, most directly and emotionally, even stridently, and this directness and passionately at the heart of its popular appeal. But there was more. The ‘romantic agony” was a wild cry of revolt and despair – and a cry of acceleration. In perversion there could be pleasure. In darkness, light. The relation of Remarque and his generation to death and destruction is not as straightforward as it appears. In his personal life and in his reflections on the war Remarque seemed fascinated by death. All of his subsequent work exudes this fascination. As one critic put it later, Remarque ‘probably made more out of death than the most fashionable undertakers.’ Like the Dadaists, he was spellbound by war in its horror, by the act of destruction, to the point where death becomes not the antithesis of life but the ultimate expression of life, where death becomes a creative force, a source of art and vitality.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era