“If the policeman regulates drinking, why should he not regulate smoking, and then sleeping, and then speaking, and then breathing?”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 5, 1920, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
“Commentators on the political scene tend in retrospect to regard the figures who emerge into prominence as totally derisory. Understandably so. It is extremely difficult, as I know from personal experience, to spend time with one or other of them without reaching the conclusion that some accomplished clown like Peter Sellers has substituted for him.”
Malcolm Muggeridge in 1972 in Chronicles of Wasted Time, in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge
“If the eighteenth century claimed to be the Age of Reason, nobody can deny the claim of the twentieth century to be the Age of Unreason.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly, Nov. 1, 1930, as header quotation on Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
In my latest Epoch Times column I complain that Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford subsidizing EV manufacturing in Canada are repeating very old economic mistakes in an unaffordable fog of smug ignorance.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I cite the tragic case of Ottawa’s Dow’s Lake to illustrate the way trendy modern urban “densification” theory is wrecking nature in the name of fighting climate change.
“There was no official response from the Israeli prime minister’s office [to the IJC ruling against the Wall], but a spokesman said unofficially that the court decision would ‘find its place in the garbage can of history.’”
David Warren in Ottawa Citizen July 14, 2004
In the Western Standard my latest book review for the Aristotle Foundation praises John Ibbitson’s The Duel while taking issue with the author’s belief that his subjects, John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson, were giants.
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask, à propos of the federal Liberals suddenly proclaimed intention to “turbocharge” housing construction after nine years of muffing the file, what leads our politicians or anyone else to have so much faith in their capacity, and the state’s capacity, to fix any and every problem life presents.