“There is a kind of God-shaped hole in many people’s lives…”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“You sit in the park and you watch the grass die... /You ask how I know of Toledo, Ohio/ Well I spent a week there one day/ They’ve got entertainment to dazzle your eyes/ Go visit the bakery and watch the buns rise”
John Denver “Toledo” quoted on the Wall St. Journal’s “OpinionJournal” Jan. 15, 2003
In my latest National Post column I say that whether American President Joe Biden broke the taboo on saying explicitly that the U.S. would defend Taiwan as a calculated geopolitical measure, or because he’s losing it, it makes the world a safer place that he blurted it out.
“The situation is not as bad as it seems – it’s worse.”
A Greek Olympic official quoted in Maclean’s July 7, 2000
“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”
Abba Eban (it was emailed by a friend without further attribution, and is widely cited online but again without any specific reference that I could find to when and where he said it)
Ralph von “Koenigswald’s discoveries [of early humans called the Solo People in Java] might have been even more impressive still but for a tactical error that was realized too late. He had offered locals ten cents for every piece of hominid bone they could come up with, then discovered to his horror that they had been enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones to maximize their income.”
Bill Bryson A Short History of Nearly Everything
In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that the painfully visible vulnerability of our electric grid is due to politicians and bureaucrats who increasingly think we should be grateful that they let us pay high prices for lousy infrastructure and other public services.
“when I opened the door [into his own office] and walked into the musty silence of the little waiting room there was the usual feeling of having been dropped down a well dried up twenty years ago to which no one would come back ever. The smell of old dust hung in the air as flat and stale as a football interview.”
Raymond Chandler The Little Sister