In my latest Loonie Politics column I lament the hypnotic post-modern incoherence of Trudeau’s simultaneous insistence that he knows borrowing is harmless and can’t do a fiscal update because the future is uncertain.
Futurologists (whether utopian or dystopian, and in this instance flapping about the Internet) make “precisely the same mistake that many historians make when writing about the remoter past. And this mistake, it seems to me, is to suppose that to change the material circumstances of life is to alter fundamentally the sense of life itself. But life as it is lived is always pretty much the same, with the same protocols of boredom and excitement, the same glare of midday and gloom of eventide, the same petty ambitions, existential doubts, and immortal longings. We can certainly create the circumstances of greater freedom or greater oppression, but the range of possible variation in life itself, in the simple, irreducible sense of being alive, is far narrower than our chattering classes usually appreciate.”
James Gardner in National Review October 14, 1996
“We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities.”
John Winthrop, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things November 2002
“Paradox is the only basket large enough to hold truth…”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb
“Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.”
George Sand, quoted on https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/george_sand_390195
“Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.”
G. K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“The pain in my soul is unbearable. I keep asking myself the same unsolvable question: If my assault rifle took people’s lives, it means that I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, ... son of a farmer and Orthodox Christian am responsible for people’s deaths. The longer I live, the more often that question gets into my brain, the deeper I go in my thoughts and guesses about why the Almighty allowed humans to have devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression. Everything changes, only a man and his thinking remain unchanged: he’s just as greedy, evil, heartless and restless as before!”
Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47 assault rifle in “a regretful letter” to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, shortly before his death at age 94, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen Jan. 14, 2014 (apparently a spokesman for the Patriarch replied “If the weapon is used to defend the Motherland, the Church supports both its creators and the servicemen using it.”)
“Fun and happiness are not synonymous. Happy people don’t need fun. Fun takes your mind off things.”
P.J. O’Rourke The Bachelor Home Companion