"Our magazine’s habit of pointing this out [that the elite’s myths about Canada are not actually true], and of stubbornly remembering times when things made more sense, causes our critics to say we’re stuck in the past. I can only reply that they are stuck in the present – in most respects a singularly dismal and confining place to be. It’s like having cultural Alzheimer’s."
Link Byfield in Globe & Mail October 25, 1999
"Nobody has a right to conduct a trade of which he is ashamed."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 2, 1936, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #6 (April/May 2004)
"The Master said, 'It is rare, indeed, for a man with cunning words and an ingratiating face to be benevolent.'"
Confucius I.3
“Memorizing a Pushkin poem or a Horace ode at least made some sense, but there was no excuse for memorizing the table of logarithms except to amaze the innocents. As with most of my tricks, it was based on unsubtle fraud. I did not memorize five million digits, I memorized the logs of the first dozen or so prime numbers. Since the property of logarithms is such that multiplication is converted into addition of exponents, it was a matter of simple arithmetic to arrive at the answer."
Nicolas Slonimski Perfect Pitch [this one is from my "Oh, just that?" file]
"There will be more, not less, respect for human rights if they can be treated as divine rights."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News January 13, 2012, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #1 (September 2004)
"it’s a bit like remodelling the basement of a house that is slowly burning down."
Steve Maich in Maclean’s April 24, 2006