In my latest National Post column I pick up on the Post’s fall series “A Serious Canada” to lament just how unserious a look at a typical newspaper front page reveals us to be on everything from Chinese Communist aggression to budgeting to open government.
“In one experiment, for example, a group of subjects is told that a man parked his car on an incline, after which it rolled down into a fire hydrant. Another group is told that the car rolled into a pedestrian. The members of the first group generally view the event as an accident; the second group holds the driver responsible.”
John Allen Paulos, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper
“Ride on the nightmare, if you prefer such horseflesh; only do not let the nightmare ride on you.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 15, 2009, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #6 (4-5/07)
In my latest Epoch Times column I say political party conventions reveal more than they mean to.
“When asked by what means she had acquired so extraordinary an influence over the mind of the Queen Mother, she replied boldly that she exercised no other power over her than that which a strong mind can always exercise over the weak.”
Charles Mackay Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (she is the Maréchale d’Ancre, executed in Paris for witchcraft and other things in 1617)
“In 1945... the vaunted thousand-year rule of the Third Reich came to a brutal end. Great cities lay in ruins. Millions were exterminated; millions more were displaced and starving. A demon in human flesh had put the whole apparatus of the modern state to work to eradicate God’s people. The last victim of every murderous demon is its human host, so staying true to Satanic form, in the final days of war, Hitler and his leading Nazi henchman pulled the trigger on their own demise.”
David Kitz Psalms Alive!
“The Grate One”
Terry O’Neill in British Columbia Report July 30, 2001 [not referring to Wayne Gretzky, just adapting his nickname to insult any annoying person]
“the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.”
Fyodor Dostyevsky, quoted by Owen Lippert in Fraser Forum July 2000