In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the Peel District School Board purging all books written before 2008 is a worrying red flag about what’s happening in government schools… and I do mean red.
“The clouds above us join and separate,/ The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns./ Life is like that, so why not relax?/ Who can stop us from celebrating?”
The poet Lu Yu, cited in Benjamin Hoff The Tao of Pooh
“They talk a great deal about education, because it is compulsory education. Whether or no they can educate, they are always eager to compel. But as a fact their aim is the very contrary of education. It is the destruction of education, and even of experience. It is to make men forget the past, forget the facts, forget the very memories of their own lives. And if their compulsory culture spreads successfully, it is very likely that we shall be alone in knowing what was known to every man, woman and child, in the hour of our danger and deliverance.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness Sept. 24, 1920, quoted in standalone boxed quotations headed “Education” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“At forty he [the villain, Jack Bolt] was an embittered man who blamed the world for the success that had never come to him, failing to understand that the fault was his own. He was one of those who had always wanted to start at the top, and the idea of consistent effort to get there had seemed futile to him.”
Louis L’Amour The Riders of High Rock
“Distance doesn’t matter. It is only the first step that is difficult.”
Marquise du Deffand, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail October 18, 2002
“The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive.”
G.K. Chesterton as a standalone quotation in illustration, without further attribution, in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“Since life passes, whether sweet or bitter,/ Since the soul must pass the lips. Whether in Nishpur or in Balkh,/ Drink wine, for after you and I are gone many a moon/ Will pass from old to new, from new to old.”
Omar Khayyam, cited in Sadegh Hedayat’s deeply disturbed novel The Blind Owl
“Those who fail in life are however very apt to assume a tone of injured innocence, and conclude too hastily that everybody excepting themselves has had a hand in their personal misfortunes…. Dr. Johnson, who came up to London with a single guinea in his pocket, and who once accurately described himself in his signature to a letter addressed to a noble lord, as IMPRANSUS, or Dinnerless, has honestly said, ‘All the complaints which are made of the world are unjust; I never knew a man of merit neglected; it was generally by his own fault that he failed of success.’”
Samuel Smiles Self-Help