"an open mind, to be sure, should be open at both ends, like the foodpipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake."

Northrop Frye The Great Code

"Of course, like Nietzsche, the most famous of God’s assassins, he [Ivan Karamazov] ends in madness. But this is a risk worth running, and, faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind is to ask: 'What does that prove?'"

Camus "Absurd Creation" in The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays

 "There is no significance to the sound and fury of his [man’s] life, as of a stage tragedy, unless something is being affirmed by the complete action."

Richard Weaver Ideas Have Consequences p. 20.

In the modern view "With the Enlightenment… World history was finally brought to its climax, its real new beginning, not in Jerusalem but in Western Europe and America, not in the first century but in the eighteenth. (We may perhaps be allowed a wry smile at the way in which post-Enlightenment thinkers to this day heap scorn upon the apparently ridiculous idea that world history reached its climax in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, while themselves holding a view we already know to be at least equally ridiculous.)"

N.T. Wright The Challenge of Jesus

"it is the only true object of existence to mean something"

G.K. Chesterton, "The Heraldic Lion," in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton

"'Don’t you swelter all day in the sun?’ Epictetus asked rhetorically [comparing watching the logistically nightmarish ancient Olympic games to life generally]. 'Aren’t you jammed in with the crowds? Isn’t it hard to get a bath? Aren’t you soaked to the bone whenever it rains? Don’t the din and the shouting and the petty annoyances drive you completely mad? But of course you put up with it all because it’s an unforgettable spectacle.'"

Tony Perrottet, author of The Naked Olympics, in Ottawa Citizen July 17, 2004

In my latest National Post column I say the Prime Minister's insistence on the Newspeak term "peoplekind" was neither a joke nor innocent.

"Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; wisdom is humble that he does not know more."

William Cowper