In my latest National Post column I say the bizarre life of the late fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld reflects the emptiness of postmodernism all too well.
"The great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered the world is by one man’s pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring him to a sense of it. It is the ordinary and trite sophism of oppression."
Edmund Burke, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things February 2003 (crediting it to a letter from Nino Langiulli of Lynbrook, New York and calling it "an observation of the ever–quotable Edmund Burke with which I was not familiar").
“Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”
Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed (according to https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/194459.Maim_nides)
“Frederick Myers describes a conversation with her [George Eliot] in which, ‘taking as her text the words God, Immortality, Duty, she pronounced, with a terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how incredible the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third’…. It is quite normal now for people to go through life without an ultimate object, but to the Victorians it was new and daunting. No wonder so many of them were such odd fish – Kitchener, Rosebery, Salisbury, Dilke, Curzon, Carson, Randolph Churchill, Fisher, Rhodes, Milner. In many cases certitude was replaced by a streak of violence…”
Paul Johnson The Offshore Islanders
“One general description of madness, it seems to us, might be found in the statement that madness is a preference for the symbol over that which it represents.”
G.K. Chesterton, “Lunacy and Letters,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
In my latest Loonie Politics column I welcome the crowded field of contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, because somewhere in the field they might be able to find a candidate whose policies are not berserk and who actually seems to like America.
“The modern artist, only too often, loses himself in seeking to find and fix himself; he imposes a fictitious self upon that unthinking real self which otherwise would be expressed freely. He has become an individualist, and ceased to be an individual. Nay, he has even become a madman in the most frightful and vivid meaning of the term. He has become conscious of his subconsciousness.”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Mirror,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“A page of history is worth a volume of logic.”
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted by John Witte, Jr. in First Things March 2004