“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.”
William S. Burroughs (quoted for instance at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/14116-a-paranoid-is-someone-who-knows-a-little-of-what-s)
“A man is known by the silence he keeps.”
Oliver Herford, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail June 24, 2005
“The fundamental question to be asked about any theological statement is, ‘What is the evidence that makes you think this might be true?’”
Author’s Introduction to John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
The German ambassador to Austria-Hungary, Baron von Tschirschky “was not much liked in Vienna: he was a stiff north German of the sort who agreed with Bismarck that ‘the Bavarian is a cross between the Austrian and homo sapiens’.”
Norman Stone “Archduke Franz Ferdinand Survives Sarajevo” in Andrew Roberts, ed., What Might Have Been
According to Schopenhauer “It is this removal of the personal equation which leaves the genius so maladapted in the world of will-full, practical, personal activity. By seeing so far he does not see what is near; he is imprudent and ‘queer’; and while his vision is hitched to a star he falls into a well.”
Will Durant The Story of Philosophy [paraphrasing not quoting]
“As long as the same passions and interests subsist among mankind, the questions of war and peace, of justice and policy, which were debated in the councils of antiquity, will frequently present themselves as the subject of modern deliberation.”
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
In my latest National Post column I say the obvious reason Jason Kenney and Erin O’Toole are facing party revolts and ugly polling numbers is that they have abandoned conservatism for opportunism.
“‘Look there, a garden!’ said my college friend,/ The Tory member’s elder son, ‘and there!/ God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,/ And keeps our Britain, whole within herself,/ A nation yet, the rulers and the ruled--/ Some sense of duty, something of a faith,/ Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,/ Some patient force to change them when we will,/ Some civic manhood firm against the crowd--/ But yonder, whiff! there comes a sudden heat,/ The gravest citizen seems to lose his head,/ The king is scared, the soldier will not fight,/ The little boys begin to shoot and stab,/ A kingdom topples over with a shriek/ Like an old woman, and down rolls the world/ In mock heroics stranger than our own;/ Revolts, republics, revolutions, most/ No graver than a schoolboys’ barring out;/ Too comic for the serious things they are,/ Too solemn for the comic touches in them,/ Like our wild Princess with as wise a dream/ As some of theirs--God bless the narrow seas!/ I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad.’”
Alfred Lord Tennyson “The Princess: Conclusion” in Alfred Tennyson: The Major Works