"It is an unfortunate habit of publicly repenting for other people’s sins."
G.K. Chesterton, “The Midnight of Europe,” in The Crimes of England, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #2 (October-November 2003)
"'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked. 'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'"
Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (frequently misquoted or misattributed including to Mark Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald according to www.sovereignman.com/offshore/slowly-at-first-then-all-at-once-12909, which warned that it applies to nations too)
My latest piece in MercatorNet, based on a speech to the Augustine College Summer Conference (and an earlier National Post column and upcoming Dorchester Review article) asks how a society as devoted to "choice" as our own can at the same time so relentlessly restrict choice.
In my latest National Post column I say people enjoy the comforting blanket of political make-believe yet crave truth when reality intrudes.
"history is little more than the Newgate calendar of nations"
Herbert Spencer, quoted by Will Durant The Story of Philosophy
“It is natural to civilised man to go back upon his past, and to be grateful for all profit he can gain from the study of his own development. So we may be certain that the claim of Greece and Rome to our eternal gratitude will never cease to be asserted, and their right to teach us still what we could have learnt nowhere else will never be successfully disputed.”
W. Warde Fowler Rome (written November 1911)
In my latest National Post column I say the horrific fire in London's Grenfell Tower happening in public housing is a powerful warning against putting too much faith in government.
“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it."
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in Cormac McCarthy No Country for Old Men