“One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing.”
C.S. Lewis God in the Dock
In my latest National Post column, I point to a Page One story in Monday's paper about children with three genetic parents to underline my warning, in the print edition that same day, that scenarios we thought we might wrestle with ethically in the future are here now. Yet we seem unready to wrestle, even unable to.
“No one is better placed to resist pressure than the person who knows he can’t give in to it.”
Conor Cruise O’Brien The Siege
“Leaders have two characteristics: (1) they are going somewhere; (2) they can persuade others to go with them.”
D.P. Diffiné, “The 1993 American Incentive System Almanac”.
"The consciousness of genius is bad for people."
Virginia Woolf in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, re Robert Graves, quoted in Raleigh Trevelyan’s Introduction to Robert Graves Goodbye to All That
"Religion makes us joyful about the things that matter. Fashionable frivolity makes us sad about the things that do not matter."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News, February 16, 1924, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #8, July/August 2000
"The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from this is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News October 21, 1905, quoted in Dale Ahlquist and Peter Floriani, Chesterton University Student Handbook
In my latest National Post column I say, from hearing a series of outstanding talks at Moses Znaimer's ideacity conference, that the future is here now.