In a speech to the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June (sorry, I’m a bit behind in my video editing) I argue that the calamities of the 20th century derived, fundamentally, from a rejection of the notion of truth.
“It is the curse of our epoch that the educated are uneducated, especially in the study of history – which is only the study of humanity. Their ignorance is less logical than the ignorance of the Dark Ages, because those ages filled the place of history with legends, which at least professed to deal with the first things, while we only fill it with news, which can only deal with the latest.”
G. K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News March 22, 1919, quoted in Gilbert Magazine April-May 2009
“‘All the same,’ said the Scarecrow, ‘I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one.’ ‘I shall take the heart,’ returned the Tin Woodman; ‘for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.’”
L. Frank Baum The Wizard of Oz
In my latest National Post column I say the first step toward an effective foreign policy is to abandon illusions about the effectiveness of “soft power” without something hard behind it.
In my latest National Post column I warn that the largest lesson of the Christine Blasey Ford-Brett Kavanaugh confrontation could easily be seen as: Avoid the opposite sex entirely.
"the mortadella of philosophers. Little globules of rich, fatty thinking, in vast quantities of baloney."
P.J. O'Rourke on Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted by Noah Richler in National Post December 6, 2001
“Winston had 10 ideas every day, only one of which was good, and he did not know which it was."
General Sir Alan Brooke, Winston Churchill’s chief of staff, quoted by John Keegan in National Post August 29, 2002