"Unpleasantries exchanged"
TSN announcer regarding a little shoving match (no fight resulted) in Toronto Maple Leafs - Minnesota North Stars game November 1, 1993
If tearing down statues of historical figures because they don't entirely meet contemporary standards worries you, come hear author Bob Plamandon and others (including me) at a Hands Off Our History barbeque this Sunday, Sept. 9, at Ottawa's Andrew Haydon Park starting at 3:00.
For details visit https://www.facebook.com/mycanadaincludesmyhistory/
“Talking about pumpkins doesn’t make them grow."
Dr. Maketsi in Alexander McCall Smith The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
In my latest National Post column I say the deep ideas the government solicited about preserving the welfare state regardless of what it actually does or what's going on around it seem to miss the point.
In lecturing to R.A.F. members during World War II “It seemed to me that they did not really believe that we have any reliable knowledge of historic man. But this was often curiously combined with a conviction that we knew a great deal about prehistoric man: doubtless because prehistoric man is labeled ‘science’ (which is reliable) whereas Napoleon or Julius Caesar is labeled as ‘history’ (which is not). Thus a pseudoscientific picture of the ‘caveman’ and a picture of ‘the present’ filled almost the whole of their imaginations; between these, there lay only a shadowy and unimportant region in which the phantasmal shapes of Roman soldiers, stagecoaches, pirates, knights-in-armor, highwaymen, etc., moved in a mist. I had supposed that if my hearers disbelieved the Gospels, they would do so because the Gospels recorded miracles. But my impression is that they disbelieved them simply because they dealt with events that happened a long time ago: that they would be almost as incredulous of the battle of Actium as of the Resurrection – and for the same reason.”
C.S. Lewis, The Grand Miracle
"'popular economist’ is a contradiction in terms. Economics has never been – and perhaps never can be – popular because it is the study of what people actually do rather than what they profess to do or recommend that others do. It lays bare hypocrisy and dwells far too gloomily on the ‘unintended results’ to which so many fine-sounding policies fall prey."
Peter Foster in Financial Post May 2, 2006
"Knowledge leads either to reverence or arrogance."
"Anonymous”, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail December 6, 2006