In my latest National Post column I expand on Chris Selley’s alarming insight that Canadian politicians and voters consistently act as if nothing mattered.
“Much history-telling casts our ancestors as stupid or villainous, who deserve our pity and scorn accordingly. This helps us swallow contemporary notions of ourselves, which are unheroic and uninteresting.”
Christopher Jolliffe “The Attack on ANZAC Day” in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)
“If you leave your children a world where you never stood up, they’ll inherit one where they can’t.”
Emailed as an image and without attribution by a friend Sept. 8, 2025
In my latest Loonie Politics column I take aim at the 20th-anniversary Harper revisionist rationalizations that he never intended to implement conservative policies, just build a winning party… which he didn’t even do anyway.
“The statistician is trying to make a rigid and unchangeable chain out of elastic links.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News July 23, 1927, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“Now this modern refusal to undo what has been done is not only an intellectual fault; it is a moral fault also. It is not merely our mental inability to understand the mistake we have made. It is also our spiritual refusal to admit that we have made a mistake.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted in stand-alone box without further attribution in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“Apparently, I must give you a lecture. I grimaced neither at your impudence nor at your sentiment, but at your diction and style. I condemn clichés, especially those that have been corrupted by fascists and communists. Such phrases as ‘great and noble cause’ and ‘fruits of their labour’ have been given an ineradicable stink by Hitler and Stalin and all their vermin brood. Besides, in this century of the overwhelming triumph of science, the appeal of the cause of human freedom is no longer that it is great and noble; it is more or less than that; it is essential. It is no greater or nobler than the cause of edible food or the cause of effective shelter. Man must have freedom or he will cease to exist as man. The despot, whether fascist or communist, is no longer restricted to such puny tools as the heel or the sword or even the machine gun; science has provided him weapons that can give him the planet; and only men who are willing to die for freedom have any chance of living for it.’”
Nero Wolfe to his adopted daughter for being reckless and romantic not practical in fighting for liberty in Rex Stout The Black Mountain
Having been called an Optimist in his youth because of his opposition to fashionable youth pessimism “after naturally enjoying the daylight, I came to be troubled with the twilight…. All that there is, in substance, on the other side, is a row of official optimists, boasting of the liberties they have not got, and defending the religion they do not believe.”
G.K. Chesterton somewhere in G.K’s Weekly Vol. 22 (3/10/35 to 12/3/36) quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #3 (Jan./Feb. 2025)