In my latest Epoch Times column I say we should be very wary of proposals from people who express angry ignorance about our Constitutional monarchy, including “republicans” who have no idea what a republic actually is.
“That is so weird about Jeremy wishing he’d never been born. I mean, we have no control over what kinda family we land in! You’re just….. there!’ ‘A newborn baby is totally innocent. Nothing is his fault! If the family you get is bizarre, that’s the way it is! You just gotta survive, that’s all.’ ‘But how do you do that, Becky? How are you supposed to know how to think an’ act an’ live?’ ‘Find someone you trust an’ respect… an’ try to be like them!’ ‘But a baby trusts everyone! That’s the problem… An’ a baby doesn’t even know what “respect” is!’ ‘No… But they know what security is… an’ they know what’s fair!’”
A conversation between three characters in “For Better or Worse” comic in Ottawa Citizen Feb. 6, 2004
“He who limps still walks.”
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, “Polish aphorist, poet, and satirist 1909-1966” [according to the Ottawa Citizen library] quoted on www.memorablequotations.com/lec.htm in 2003
“Nature is never novel; the spire of Salisbury Cathedral only has to be seen to remind one that one always knew it was there.”
Malcolm Muggeridge About Kingsmill (1951) in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge
“It was from Hitchens, for example, that I learned the great definition of ‘the upper crust’ as ‘a load of crumbs held together by dough’ – Bolshevist, to be sure, but lovely.”
Michael Potemra reviewing Christopher Hitchens’ new anthology, mostly favourably, in National Review February 24, 2005
“How many men have sold their souls to be admired by fools?”
G. K. Chesterton in “Ring of Lovers” in The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond quoted in “Chesterton For Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“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)