"A specialist is someone who does everything else worse."
"U.S. violinist Ruggiero Ricci" quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail Oct. 13, 2006.
"The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture which he now most commonly quotes is, 'The kingdom of heaven is within you.'"
G.K. Chesterton, “The Spirit of America,” in What I Saw in America, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #8 (July-August 2004)
“But things aren’t all puppies and hugs either.”
Letter from Bonnie Tompkins (a “bar server” writing about the Ottawa antismoking bylaw) in Ottawa Citizen Dec. 27, 2001
"The contemplative life is often miserable. You should do more, think less and not watch yourself living."
Nicholas-Sebastien Chamfort, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Globe & Mail Oct. 22, 2002
In my latest Looniepolitics column I worry that the Auditor General's description of government failures as "incomprehensible" suggests that our political class has far too little grasp of how the state in which they place so much faith actually works... or doesn't.
"Without the individuals whose names have dominated the preceding pages – Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Konoe and Tojo, Churchill and Roosevelt – the course of history would have been different. But how different? The role of the individual set against the impersonal, external determinants of change is a perpetual conundrum in the interpretation of history.... the individuals at the centre of our enquiry were not ciphers or mere ‘front-men’. They had an input that is not simply reducible to a personalized representational function of such forces.”
Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices