“That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. We are in the wrong world. When I thought that was the right town, it bored me; when I knew it was wrong, I was happy. So the false optimism, the modern happiness, tires us because it tells us we fit into this world. The true happiness is that we don’t fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Ballad of a Strange Town” in Tremendous Trifles, quoted by Joseph Grabowski in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #11 (9-10/21)

“It wasn’t clear whether this was obvious, false, or possibly both.”

Peter Foster in National Post November 19, 1999 [specifically regarding Peter Drucker and entering a “knowledge society” but it applies amazingly widely].

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say there’s a silver lining to people noticing thanks to the pandemic that the Charter doesn’t protect us from overbearing government … but only if we decide to fix the problem, and the Constitution.

“researchers who study emotion regulation – how we cope, or fail to cope, with the daily swirl of feelings – are discovering that many anxious people are bound and determined (though not always consciously) to cultivate anxiety.”

A Newsweek item quoted in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail February 11, 2011

On Jan. 12 I was on NewsTalk Sauga 960 to discuss my National Post column on the Pope’s remarks about the selfishness of choosing pets over kids, and the self-absorbed response of some commentators.

In my latest National Post column I lampoon self-centred objections to the Pope calling preferring pets to children selfish.

“he looked upon us as a sort of animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than by its assistance, to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had not given us; that we …had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions…”

The narrator’s account of his Houyhnhnm master’s judgement on humans, in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels

“Expectations are resentments under construction.”

Anne Lamott, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail July 27, 2001