“Reading this column was like eating a chocolate-covered lemon: sweet on the outside, but terribly bitter when you bite down.”
Letter from Jill Woodley of Ottawa in Ottawa Citizen November 14, 2004 [not about one of my columns]
"Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News January 27, 1923, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 # 4 (Jan./Feb. 2001)
In my latest National Post column I say the Prime Minister isn't being inconsistent or confused about allegedly groping a reporter 18 years ago; he's consistently denying the existence of truth.
"As a schoolboy, I would supplement my English lessons by buying and reading The Morning Star, a foreign English-language newspaper that was available in the USSR. The Soviets permitted us to read this Communist daily published in London because, in being very critical of the democratic and capitalist world, the paper parroted the ideological line of the party. For me, however, its effect would prove highly subversive. What left a lasting impression was not the content of the criticism but the very fact that people outside the Soviet Union were free to criticize their own government without going to prison. The stronger the criticism, the more impressed I was by the degree of freedom enjoyed elsewhere."
"Preface" in Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy
In my latest National Post column I say liberal reactions to actual diversity tend to be unfavourable, suggesting that their theoretical devotion to it simply confuses debate.
"tough as goat guts"
Former New York Times editor Howell Raines (of his predecessor James Reston), quoted by Robert Fulford in National Post March 26, 2004