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.

“St Augustine, it would be generally agreed, has had a greater influence upon the history of dogma and upon religious thought and sentiment in Western Christendom than any other writer outside the canon of Scripture. It is easy to find at least one reason for this in the circumstances of the age during which his life was passed. From A.D. 350 till about A.D. 500 the vital powers of the ancient civilization were steadily declining, while at the same time the church was coming to social maturity with a number of insistent needs and demands which had not made themselves felt until full freedom of action had been attained. This period was followed by another, some 500 years in length, in which intellectual life at the higher levels was all but extinct in the West, and this epoch in its turn by one in which an adolescent Europe turned avidly for mental food to the masters nearest to hand and latest in time, the Latin writers of the imperial decline, who alone were available in the libraries of the age. These circumstances gave great importance and a new significance to a scattered group of teachers who had been the last to absorb the message of the ancient world while it was still to be heard, and who had therefore been the last to hand on the legacy of the past…”

David Knowles The Evolution of Medieval Thought [the metaphor of an “adolescent Europe” deserves attention but not respect].

“To paraphrase Japanese Emperor Hirohito after the detonation of two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, in the light of this week’s events, it is time for the ‘unthinkable.’ (The Japanese emperor acknowledged that the war had not gone ‘entirely as we had hoped.’)”

Conrad Black in National Post June 28, 2025 [re Gaza and Iran]

“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)

“It may be a strange sight to see the blind leading the blind; but England provides a stranger. England shows us the blind leading the people who can see. And this again is an under-statement of the case.”

G.K. Chesterton in “A Glimpse of my Country” in Tremendous Trifles, quoted in “The Golden Key Chain GKC on Scripture Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)

“Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.”

“Doug Larson (English middle-distance runner who won gold medals at the 1924 Olympic Games)”, emailed without further attribution by a friend

“Pilot, you’ll never get anywhere in this life if you only do what is wise.”

Lt.-Cmdr. Ninian Scott-Elliot, who had a distinguished wartime career with the Royal Navy (and uttered this phrase when warned that his plane was pursuing a U-boat too close to shore) before moving to the Solomons where he died age 86, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen April 19, 1998