In my latest National Post column I ask whether Canadians will yet again excuse a pathetic performance by an elite institution because we are snobs.
“Why does the Post Office return a letter that’s one cent short on the postage? It costs more than a cent to get the extra penny. But if they didn’t, almost everyone would send insufficient postage letters and they’d lose a fortune.”
This one is from me (January 2, 2002) and if you think it prosaic, well, it’s still an important principle of economics.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say inflation isn’t a conspiracy run out of Davos and the conservatives don’t have a hidden agenda and climate skeptics aren’t in the pay of Big Oil and nobody can be bothered plotting against you nor could they if they tried because the people in power are just as muddled as they appear to be.
“that cruelty which is the last defense of a horribly pained sensitivity...”
My source for this in my notes is “A Common Reader catalogue # 14, 8/88” and it wouldn’t be fair to ask you what it means but sadly it wouldn’t be productive to ask me either
“The world is filled with willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.”
Widely attributed to Robert Frost online, but I haven’t seen any actual specific place he supposedly said or wrote it
“Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this. Thus all our dignity consists in thought. It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.”
Blaise Pascal in Peter Kreeft Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined & Explained
“Deja moo: The feeling that you’ve heard this bull before.”
“Gilbert Magazine’s Top 15 Yet More Internet Taglines” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #6 (and yes, it bends my rule against vulgarity but I find it sufficiently funny)
“All habits are bad habits.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Joseph Connors in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 # 8 (July-August 1999)