“That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. We are in the wrong world. When I thought that was the right town, it bored me; when I knew it was wrong, I was happy. So the false optimism, the modern happiness, tires us because it tells us we fit into this world. The true happiness is that we don’t fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Ballad of a Strange Town” in Tremendous Trifles, quoted by Joseph Grabowski in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #11 (9-10/21)

“It wasn’t clear whether this was obvious, false, or possibly both.”

Peter Foster in National Post November 19, 1999 [specifically regarding Peter Drucker and entering a “knowledge society” but it applies amazingly widely].

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say there’s a silver lining to people noticing thanks to the pandemic that the Charter doesn’t protect us from overbearing government … but only if we decide to fix the problem, and the Constitution.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Richard Feynman, as the “Quote of the Week” in Watts Up With That “Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #476” October 25, 2021

“The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.”

Titus Livius, aka “Livy” The Early History of Rome

In my latest National Post column I say the reason official Ottawa is so inert in the face of rising inflation, beyond the usual smugness, is that if interest rates go up public borrowing will become unsustainable. (As in the US, where it’s beyond the more general issue of rage rather than Canadian-style complacency paralyzing debate.)

“Remember when we treated the flu with chicken soup, saltines and warm tea instead of communism!”

Emailed by a friend October 16, 2021 [I believe original with him]

In my latest Epoch Times column I say it’s not really news that our vaunted socialized medicine delivers terrible results at excessive cost… or that calls for reform always specify that in revamping it nothing must be changed.