In my latest Loonie Politics column I note the irony of people who spent decades destigmatizing everything and saying we should all do whatever we feel like now complaining that nowadays we all just do whatever we feel like.
“My personal favourite [among her late father’s many fine turns of phrase]… his technical term for fixing any appliance by means of a quick smack on the top or side: ‘Repair Scheme Number One.’”
Jean Mills in Globe & Mail June 18, 2004
“Even given his concern for sparrows, the likelihood of God being concerned with hijabs seems small…. What must God think of all this [the Asmahan Mansour controversy]? Of one thing I am certain: whatever he turns out to be will bear no resemblance to the god imagined by any of the religions I know, ancient or modern, mono- or polytheistic. My belief in God is persistent and I pray. I know not to what I pray – Paul Johnson’s wonderful book The Quest for God tells me that my prayers are to a God that hears everything, but while I want to believe that, I have great difficulty doing so…. There are few things as ridiculous as a bunch of apes trying to be spiritual. If eventually we get to meet or understand the nature of God before or after our death, I think the likelihood of his concerns overlapping those of any religion to be very small.”
Barbara Amiel in Maclean’s March 19, 2007, very certain that everyone else’s certainty about God is laughably wrong and hers is totally right.
“In our day the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has written powerfully about the ‘second naïveté’ that is the mark of true faith. A century earlier, Kierkegaard wrote about ‘the second immediacy,’ the possibility of being a child or youth for the second time.”
Richard John Neuhaus, “Kierkegaard for Grownups,” in First Things #146 (October 2004)
“Be discreet in all things, and so render it unnecessary to be mysterious about any.”
The Duke of Wellington according to AZ Quotes [https://www.azquotes.com/author/15482-Duke_of_Wellington]
“But when your sword breaks, you draw your dagger.”
Nikabrik [re using bad magic, however] in C.S. Lewis Prince Caspian
“In the famous exchange of letters (in Latin) between C.S. Lewis and St. Giovanni Calabria, Lewis makes a prescient remark: ‘They err who say: “The world is turning pagan again.” Would that it were! The truth is, we are falling into a much worse state. Post-Christian man is not the same as pre-Christian man. He is as far removed as a virgin from a widow.’”
Ted Janiszewski in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“The same age which tends to economic slavery tends to social anarchy; and especially to sexual anarchy. So long as men can be driven in droves like sheep, they can be as promiscuous as sheep.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly March 9, 1929, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)