"If he’s mad, I hope he’ll bite some of my other generals."
King George II responding to criticism of General James Wolfe, quoted by John Ivison in National Post June 12, 2012
"The truth is that I care more for my dog, donkey, and garden in the little English village where we live than for all the publicity in the world."
Frances Chesterton (GKC's wife), "to an American reporter during one of G.K.’s lecture tours”, quoted by Therese Warmus in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2005)
In my latest National Post column I warn that the largest lesson of the Christine Blasey Ford-Brett Kavanaugh confrontation could easily be seen as: Avoid the opposite sex entirely.
“It was this century [the last before Christ] that produced most of the famous Romans whose names are familiar to us: the two Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, and finally Augustus, all of whom helped in various ways to save Italy and the Empire from premature dissolution. It was, in fact, an age of great personalities, and one, too, in which personal character became as deeply interesting to the men of the time as it is even now to us.”
W. Warde Fowler, Rome.
"At its core, after all, what is the free market? It’s a mechanism designed to solve a coordination problem, arguably the most important coordination problem: getting resources to the right places at the right cost."
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say, and then don't say it."
Sam Levenson, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail August 25, 2010
In the latest issue of The Landowner I ridicule Britain’s Royal Academy for putting on a show of what Renaissance artists should have painted if they’d been smart, nice and sophisticated like us.