“It was Macaulay who remarked that it was not pleasant to live in times about which it was exciting to read.”
Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
“Says a passage in the Talmud” according to Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties
“Men have no right to complain that they are naturally feeble and short-lived, or that it is chance and not merit that decides their destiny. On the contrary, reflection will show that nothing exceeds or surpasses the powers with which nature has endowed mankind, and that it is rather energy they lack than strength or length of days.”
Sallust, The Jugurthine War
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say if heads don’t roll over the latest revelations from the Mass Casualty Commission then we have pretty much given up on truth and decency.
“We live in strange times. Humans are loose upon the earth.”
Not sure why this of all weeks I quoted myself so often (this one from May 12, 2005) but since I don’t check the attributions while choosing them, only when posting them, we’re both stuck with it.
“May you live through interesting times.”
Another of mine, from September 13 2001 (and yes, adapted from the supposed Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times.”)
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“A charitable view is that [Alan] Greenspan is what Karl Popper called a ‘historicist’ – one who believes the way people respond to incentives changes, so that economic models true last year are no longer true today…. But, what looks like an open and forward-looking mind may be, as Popper suggested, nothing more than a mind without bearings.”
Filip Palda in Ottawa Citizen March 17, 2000
In a Loonie Politics piece I should have posted a couple of weeks ago I say it would be instructive to look back at old newspapers to see what did get covered, and how, as opposed to what turned out to matter and why.