“I personally view punditry as Nero’s art – playing the fiddle while Rome is burning – but, as the fine Australian commentator, Walter Murdoch, pointed out years ago: ‘If everyone had refrained from fiddling when Rome was burning, what would have become of the noble art of music? For when has Rome not been burning?’”
George Jonas in Ottawa Citizen June 24, 2006
“When men claimed scientific authority for their ignorance, and police support for their aggressive presumption, it is time for Mr Chesterton and all other men of sense to withstand them sturdily.”
George Bernard Shaw reviewing G.K. Chesterton’s 1922 Eugenics and Other Evils in The Nation. Shaw called it “a graver, harder book” than GKC’s other books, in a good way, and praised his “sledge-hammer directness” and taking a stand, according to Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #3 Jan.-Feb. 2022)
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the goal of Parliamentary redistricting should be improving government not indulging a penchant for regional bickering. Happily, adding a lot more MPs will help achieve the former and avoid the latter.
“If you’re in a dark and terrible place, and someone says, ‘You’re okay the way you are,’ you don’t know what to do about that. ‘No, I’m not. I’m having a terrible time. And I’m hopeless.’ Well, then what? That’s it? What do you want to tell a young person? ‘You’re 17. You’re okay the way you are.’ No, you’re not. You’ve got 60 years to be better. You could be incomparably better across multiple dimensions. And in pursuing that better, that’s where you’ll find the meaning in your life. And that will give you the antidote to the suffering.”
Jordan Peterson on Instagram March 29, 2022 [https://www.instagram.com/p/CbQwpO6Mekq/]
The world “continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords.”
Lord Birkenhead (F.E. Smith) in 1923 according to a writer whose name I did not record, if the piece was signed, in National Review November 15, 1993
“Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the Unknowable. But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”
H.L. Mencken, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail April 6, 2009
“As the historian Forrest McDonald pointed out, Filmer never persuaded anyone by eloquence or logic, since he possessed neither.”
Richard Brookheiser in National Review February 22, 1999 [Filmer being the 17th-century English Tory essayist Robert Filmer, the target of John Locke’s now mostly unread First Treatise of Government, which is now mostly unread in significant measure because it demolished Filmer so completely that nobody now remembers him]
In my latest Loonie Politics column I praise Mikhail Gorbachev for the fundamental decency that led him to permit the peaceful dissolution of Soviet Communism. But I insist that he was no statesman, and no thinker, and that credit for ending the Cold War properly belongs with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and their supporters.