“Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.”

Martin Capages Jr. on substack [https://martincapagesjrphdpe.substack.com/p/c-s-lewis-on-climate-change-and-the] quoting C.S. Lewis God in the Dock [https://books.google.ca/books?id=loE7BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA350&lpg=PA350&dq]

“I was eating this orange on a busy Friday afternoon and thinking ‘Dagnabbit, this thing is so juicy it’s getting all over everything.’”

One of mine, from May 17, 2002, illustrating how easy it is to slide into ingratitude.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say it’s actually good news that about two-thirds of Canadians in a poll said they think “everything is broken in this country right now” because we still expect better and have not spiraled into rage, paranoia or, worst of all, resignation.

“There is only one intelligent reason why a man does not believe in miracles and that is that he does believe in materialism.”

G.K. Chesterton “Miracles and Death” in St. Francis of Assisi, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4.

“As for Martin, he was firmly persuaded that a man is badly off wherever he is, so he suffered in patience.”

Voltaire Candide

“I try to enthuse my patients with the glory of the world, with indifferent success, I must admit. It is almost as if they wanted the world to be boring, to justify their own lack of interest in it. To be bored and disabused is taken by many people nowadays as a sign of spiritual election or superiority, as if the world does not quite come up to their exacting standards.”

Theodore Dalrymple in National Post December 27, 2003

“The function of imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders.”

G.K. Chesterton “A Defence of China Shepherdesses” in The Defendant quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (11/12/2021)

“If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.”

Alan Watts quoted in Jon Winokur Zen To Go