“People are most often of two basic types – those who always have an excellent reason why they are not able to do something, and those who always get their tasks done, somehow.”
Martin Anderson Revolution
“That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, though, was a matching principle: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was – in a formulation increasingly deployed by canon lawyers – a human ‘right’. Law, in the Latin West, had become an essential tool of its ongoing revolution.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [re Gratian and the Decretum and the resulting intellectual and procedural revolution]
“If our government were really a representative government, it would certainly not be a meddlesome government.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 15, 1924 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Mark Carney’s jet-setting quest for European Union “associate membership”, which doesn’t even exist anyway, is classic Carney blarney, all maze and no cheese.
In my latest National Post column I say Mark Carney’s “Investment Summit” was classic Carney blarney, windy and impractical.
“For the British the war was a practical necessity, a sentiment captured by the slogan ‘business as usual.’ As one soldier put it in a letter to his parents on October 1, 1914: ‘We are just at the beginning of the struggle I’m afraid, and every hour we should remind ourselves that it is our great privilege to save the traditions of all centuries behind us. It’s a grand opportunity, and we must spare no effort to use it, for if we fail we shall curse ourselves in bitterness every year that we live, and our children will despise our memory.’ For the Germans this was a war to change the world; for the British this was a war to preserve a world. The Germans were propelled by a vision, the British by a legacy. For the average British soldier there was no question of who was responsible for the war.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“This is a paradox of democracy, that though men can be as paltry as their own most paltry aims, they can also be as heroic as their own most heroic aims.”
G.K. Chesterton in Morning Leader 24/2/1904 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)
“In foreign policy, as in many other areas, you must not allow the answer you intuit to the followup ‘What can we do?’ to interfere with clear analysis of the first question ‘Is there a problem and if so, what is it?’”
One of mine, from July 2002, re Iraq.