“But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
The king of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
“A man is destroyed by the inner conviction of uselessness.”
E.B. Schumacher Small is Beautiful
“For it is the nature of the many to be ruled by fear rather than by shame, and to refrain from evil not because of the disgrace but because of the punishments. Living under the sway of their feelings, they pursue their own pleasures and the means of obtaining them, and shun the pains that are their opposites; but of that which is fine and truly pleasurable they have not even a conception, because they have never had a taste of it.”
Aristotle Ethics
In my latest National Post column, I say the Prime Minister’s real problem in fighting to keep Enbridge 5 open is that he actually believes fossil fuels are worse than useless.
“Like the economist on the desert island who assumes a can opener, the secularist assumes human dignity and…”
Once again I immodestly quote myself, specifically an idea that occurred to me at Centre for Cultural Renewal conference on faith and politics in Montreal in October 2002
“It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck. Every man has had one horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been. But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe’s ship. That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added. The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“This sort of thing happens because most people, if not all, although they wish to do a fine thing, choose the course that is profitable.”
Aristotle Ethics
“I have a worldview, of a sort, and a wider concern. But politics begins at home. The immediate business, and the one that one might hope to understand, is not to reform the world or save mankind, but to make decisions relative to Australia’s immediate needs.”
“Politics” in “A Plot Unmasked” in Leonie Kramer, ed., James McAuley: Poetry, essays and personal commentary