“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
T.S. Eliot according to https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/101806-half-the-harm-that-is-done-in-this-world-is [part of it was emailed by a friend but whenever possible I do try to check]
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the Hogue inquiry did a spectacular, smug Establishment job of overlooking the key questions needed to restore public trust in our institutions, namely “Who were they?” and “What did they do?”
The historical approach to English Literature “has been destroyed at Cambridge and is now being destroyed at Oxford too. This is done by a compact, well-organized group of whom [F.R.] Leavis is the head. It now has a stranglehold on the schools as well as the universities (and the High Brow press). It is too open and avowed to be called a plot. It is much more like a political party – or Inquisition. Leavis himself is something (in the long run) more fatal than a villain. He is a perfectly sincere, disinterested, fearless, ruthless fanatic. I am sure he would, if necessary, die for his critical principles: I am afraid he might also kill for them. Ultimately, a pathological type – unhappy, intense, mirthless. Incapable of conversation: dead silence or prolonged, passionate, and often irrelevant, monologue are his only two lines.”
A letter from C.S. Lewis to J.B. Priestley on September 18, 1962, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis
In my latest Epoch Times column I say one reason Canadian politicians are struggling to respond to Trump’s tariff threats is that most of them are closet mercantilists who just say they favour and understand free trade.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I complain that provincial conservative first minister Doug Ford is just as contemptuous of the legislature as federal liberal first minister Justin Trudeau… and legislators and we citizens let him get away with it.
“For as Chesterton remarked, you cannot introduce anarchy into the intellect without also introducing anarchy into the commonwealth.”
Link Byfield in British Columbia Report November 17, 1997
“The reasonable people (for I know some quite reasonable people who allow me to talk to them), the rationalists, the liberal progressive people all say, ‘The Indian need is Independence; it must be a self-governing unit,’ and so on. Then they both say, ‘Let us hope no silly squabbles about religion will spoil this great unity,’ whether Imperial or National. Now I am so perverse that I think the religious squabbles are much less silly than the political squabbles. I am much more certain that there is such a thing as Islam than there is such a thing as India. I believe much more in the existence of a Hindoo than in the existence of an Indian. And I think the difficulties do arise from the doctrines; but much more from the trick of ignoring the doctrines.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Thing They Left Out” in the New York American January 9, 1932 reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“It would be impolitic to suggest [Chrystia] Freeland has gone bananas, but she has definitely been at the fruit bowl.”
Michael Higgins in National Post June 11, 2024 [re the Canadian Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister suddenly claiming that without their capital gains tax increase the rich will live in fortified enclaves while the poor burn everything else down].