“Look, I love [his] work. But have you seen the man trying to communicate without a script? He’s about as articulate as a bag of potato chips. Warren Beatty couldn’t win a debate with a mime.”
Richard Roper in the Chicago Sun-Times regarding a potential Beatty presidential run quoted in Globe & Mail September 7, 1999
“He offers a remarkable tribute to the almost forgotten truth that man is never genuinely at home except in goodness, that artistic emotions can no more refresh the nature than a liqueur can quench the thirst.’”
G.K. Chesterton (on Aleister Crowley, whose doctrines he loathed and the one person he refused to debate, but with regard to his book The Soul of Osiris), quoted by Chris Chan in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“there is little reason to believe that this socialism [that he saw coming in Britain and the U.S.] will mean the advent of the civilization of which orthodox socialists dream. It is much more likely to present fascist features. That would be a strange answer to Marx’s prayer. But history sometimes indulges in jokes of questionable taste.”
Joseph Schumpeter Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
“Job explosion stuns analysts/ The economy’s job-generating power – more than 100,000 new jobs last month – has stunned analysts, and even though they agree it can’t last, they cheered the unexpected surge in employment.”
Headline and first sentence in news story in Ottawa Citizen Dec. 5, 1998
“That is so weird about Jeremy wishing he’d never been born. I mean, we have no control over what kinda family we land in! You’re just….. there!’ ‘A newborn baby is totally innocent. Nothing is his fault! If the family you get is bizarre, that’s the way it is! You just gotta survive, that’s all.’ ‘But how do you do that, Becky? How are you supposed to know how to think an’ act an’ live?’ ‘Find someone you trust an’ respect… an’ try to be like them!’ ‘But a baby trusts everyone! That’s the problem… An’ a baby doesn’t even know what “respect” is!’ ‘No… But they know what security is… an’ they know what’s fair!’”
A conversation between three characters in “For Better or Worse” comic in Ottawa Citizen Feb. 6, 2004
“He who limps still walks.”
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, “Polish aphorist, poet, and satirist 1909-1966” [according to the Ottawa Citizen library] quoted on www.memorablequotations.com/lec.htm in 2003
“Nature is never novel; the spire of Salisbury Cathedral only has to be seen to remind one that one always knew it was there.”
Malcolm Muggeridge About Kingsmill (1951) in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge
“It was from Hitchens, for example, that I learned the great definition of ‘the upper crust’ as ‘a load of crumbs held together by dough’ – Bolshevist, to be sure, but lovely.”
Michael Potemra reviewing Christopher Hitchens’ new anthology, mostly favourably, in National Review February 24, 2005