“One of the most enduring truths is that man is a verb; but what human beings can do remains astonishing and frightening.”
Michael Young in National Review Dec. 5, 1994
“It was perhaps never so necessary as now that we should know why the arts are important and avoid inadequate answers. It will probably become increasingly more important in the future. Remarks such as these, it is true, are often uttered by enthusiastic persons, and are apt to be greeted with the same smile as the assertion that the future of England is bound up with Hunting.”
I.A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism (and written in 1924, as if to prove his point)
“John -- 2014 comes to an end in just a few weeks. Now is the time to save big and support the the important work of the Ontario NDP! All donations to the Ontario NDP in 2014, are eligible for generous provincial tax credits.”
“Hey John,/ Did you know that when you donate to the NDP, you get up to 75% back in tax credits?/ I’m not a banker or a sales guy, but that’s a great deal no matter how you slice it. Here’s what you’re eligible for if you chip in before December 31st./ Total you’ve given in 2015: $0*/ What you could get back in tax credits: $30/ Donation required today to get $30 back: $40/ Donate $40 today to maximize your tax credits before the deadline.”
Email from “Ontario NDP” Dec. 5, 2014 and email from “Director of Operations/ Canada’s New Democrats” Dec. 14, 2015. Just a few among many they’ve sent me (in return for zero total lifetime contribution) in an effort to prove that even socialists know incentives matter, except when devising or debating policy.
“Christmas can be commercial and tacky – after all, graduations, weddings and funerals are often commercial and tacky – but it should never be sentimental. Sentimentality is love without sacrifice. The sentimental man sends his wife flowers but never helps with the dishes.”
Fr. Raymond J. DeSouza in National Post Dec. 24, 2002
“Things do come to those who wait, but only things left over from those who hustle.”
Not Abraham Lincoln, despite countless internet attributions. (And to be blunt, it doesn’t sound like him either, in tone or content.) It’s still a good line. But not his.
“It is a pressing problem for a credible theology, second only to the problem of suffering, to give some satisfactory account of why the diversity of religious affirmations should not lead us to the conclusion that they are merely the expression of culturally determined opinions. Kenneth Cragg reminds us that even in the seventeenth century John Bunyan felt the difficulty. In Grace Abounding he wrote, ‘Everyone doth think his own religion rightest, both Jews and Moors and Pagans: and how if our faith, and Christ, and scriptures, should be but a think so too?’ Of course, there is unquestionably a degree of cultural determination in our actual religious beliefs. If I had grown up in Saudi Arabia, rather than in England, it would be foolish to deny that the chances are I would be a Muslim. But the chances are also that I would not have spent most of my life as a theoretical physicist, but that does not mean that science is simply a cultural artefact. We must not commit the genetic fallacy of supposing that origin explains away the content of belief.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“he seems as unprepossessing as an unshelled peanut.”
Peter C. Newman on Joe Clark in National Post Feb. 19, 2000
“And what, philosophically, is the difference between those physically alive, but sleepwalking through their daily existence and those physically dead but alive in the being of others?”
A writer whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine July 1987