IIn my latest Loonie Politics column I urge everyone to consider the long-term consequences for our political culture if the authorities get away with smirking their way through an inquiry and a national security scandal.
“‘Most people have never really been listened to. They live in a lonely silence – no one knowing what they feel, how they live or what they have done…. There are no words to adequately describe what it is like to be free with another person. It is most often a sensing that someone will let us be all of what we are at that moment. We can talk about whatever we wish, express in any way whatever feelings are in our hearts. We can take as much time as we need. We can sit, stand, pace, yell, cry, pound the floor, dance or weep for joy. Whatever and however we are at the moment is accepted and respected…’”
Dr. Carl Faber’s book On Listening, quoted in Valerie Geller Creating Powerful Radio
“Over the centuries, historians and philosophers have put together a certain idea about how Western civilization developed. It began in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Arabs developed our numbers, the Phoenicians the first phonetic alphabet, the Greeks democracy, the Romans large-scale government, the Hebrews a single god and a system of morals, and the Christians a spirituality based on redemption and grounded in a vast international church. The Roman Empire fell and the Dark Ages descended, until the arrival of the Renaissance, then the Age if Science and the Enlightenment, colonialism, the romantic era, modernity, and perhaps something we now call the postmodern age. In this sketchy account, humanity passes civilization down the centuries like a baton in a relay race…. This account remains, up the present, the essential background to all discussions of western culture, even for those who dispute it. Critics may argue with this or that part of it, or rewrite bits of it: still, the master narrative remains, because we have not concocted a credible substitute.”
Robert Fulford The Triumph of Narrative
“As modern words are actually used, there is hardly a shade of difference left between meaning well and meaning nothing.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly October 25, 1934, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 1922 [and if you’re thinking wow, someone who could describe current conditions so exactly nearly a hundred years ago must have understood the underlying processes at work very well, I couldn’t agree more].
“there is no such thing in the world as a dull subject.”
G.K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Bores,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the Prime Minister’s insistence that he avoided any briefing on Chinese Communist meddling in Canadian elections, even after a story broke about our security agencies telling him of it, makes him unfit for office whether it’s the obtuse truth or a stupid lie.
In my latest Mercatornet column I ask what history has to say about the possibility of the United States breaking apart, and find the answer troubling.
“The greatest results in life are usually attained by simple means, and the exercise of ordinary qualities…. The road of human welfare lies along the old highway of steadfast well-doing; and they who are the most persistent, and work in the truest spirit, will usually be the most successful. Fortune has often been blamed for her blindness; but fortune is not so blind as men are. Those who look into practical life will find that fortune is usually on the side of the industrious, as the winds and waves are on the side of the best navigators. In the pursuit of even the highest branches of human inquiry, the commoner qualities are found the most useful – such as common sense, attention, application, and perseverance. Genius may not be necessary, though even genius of the highest sort does not disdain the use of these ordinary qualities. The very greatest men have been among the least believers in the power of genius, and as worldly wise and persevering as successful men of the commoner sort.”
Samuel Smiles Self-Help