In my latest Loonie Politics column I welcome the youth of tomorrow’s future back to the dismal reality of today’s schooling with an assignment to write an essay on what they’d really do if they were in charge, and why it would be so different from what they promised and expected to do.
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
E.B. White, emailed by a friend and confirmed online by e.g. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/e_b_white_106410
“Scandalous rumors concerning the state of the times had reached my ears.”
Jupiter in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Charlotte F. Otten, ed. A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves In Western Culture.
In my latest National Post column I say we can’t rationally decide whether we want “strong” mayors for our cities until we decide what mayors are for, and what they are.
“Few are presumptuous enough to dispute with a chemist or mathematician upon points connected with the studies of labour of his life. But almost any man who can read and write feels at liberty to form and maintain opinions of his own upon trade and money …. The economic literature of every succeeding year embraces works conceived in the true scientific spirit, and works exhibiting the most vulgar ignorance of economic history and the most flagrant contempt for the conditions of economic investigation. It is much as if astrology were being pursued side by side with astronomy or alchemy with chemistry.”
Gen. Francis A. Walker, a professor at Yale and later president of M.I.T., quoted by Milton Friedman in CATO Policy Report Vol. XXI No. 2; another source on which my notes are culpably incomplete calls him “probably the most famous American economist of the nineteenth century” and director of two national censuses, which latter claim Wikipedia confirms, adding that he was wounded at Chancellorsville, fought in other battles, became a POW, was made a brevet brigadier general at age 24, and went on to a series of other achievements that make one wonder what one has done with one’s own life.
In my latest Epoch Times column I explain why we talk a lot less about free speech than we used to, and a lot less convincingly.
“My dad wasn’t lazy, he just had a genius for not considering the future.”
Audie Murphy, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, Heroes of World War II
“The best way out is always through.”
Robert Frost, widely cited online (and in fact it turns out to be from the rather bleak poem "A Servant to Servants" https://www.poetryverse.com/robert-frost-poems/a-servant-to-servants)