“Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.”
C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy
“Chicago’s going to want to pour on all the throttles here.”
Play-by-play announcer on ESPN February 1987
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the familiar tone of the weird rhetoric from the Communist Chinese government should alert us to other familiar obnoxious features of that regime.
In my latest Epoch Times column I defend the new British PM’s decision to start a new session of Parliament as a small step toward restoring Parliament’s historical constitutional function of restraining the executive.
“Romance lurks in unexpected places. We walk abroad amidst scenes made dull by familiarity, and let our thoughts ramble far away beyond the commonplace… and behold! all the time Romance is at our very doors.”
The narrator in R. Austin Freeman, “The Dead Hand,” in Douglas G. Greene, ed., Detection by Gaslight: 14 Victorian Detective Stories (the reference is to adventure and wonder not love specifically).
“Our intellect, however, no matter how independent of the past it may behave in science and technology, is ever renewed and consecrated by the consciousness of its connection with the mind of the remotest times and civilization.”
Jacob Burckhardt Judgement on History and Historians