In my latest National Post column I argue that the quantity of antidepressants we now take, with shockingly little understanding of their direct or indirect effects, is not cause for complacency about progress.

"If you subsidize a thing, you’re going to get it."

Dinesh D’Souza in Chronicles magazine September 1991.

"Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing."

Henri-Fréderic Amiel in Journal intime
 

"But, when infection is about, an open mind is about as safe as an open sewer."

Nicholas Murray in The Sunday Times April 7, 2002 (specifically re Aldous Huxley succumbing to so many cranky notions before and after moving to California) 

"The object of philanthropy is to do good; the object of religion is to be good, if only for a moment, amid a crash of brass."

G.K. Chesterton in Heretics
GKC Heretics

"I sleep like a baby, too. Every two hours, I wake up screaming."

Then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, re reports that President George W. Bush had slept like a baby in the runup to the Iraq war, quoted in Globe and Mail Nov. 16, 2004 (I swear I thought of this joke years earlier but Powell beat me into print and may himself have come up with the gag long before)

In my latest National Post column I take on the concept that a new phone, or new anything, can revolutionize our lives every few years.