“This place is a hive of inactivity.”
Another of mine, from September 17, 2004, on being disappointed to see nothing happening on the roadwork outside our house… again.
“But even if ‘escape’ is the right word [for various rural wanderings], we will throw in our lot with Tolkien, who pointed out that escape of a certain type may not be such a bad thing: ‘Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.’”
Mark Johnson in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
“‘man will live forevermore because of Christmas day,’ as Harry Belafonte put it in those more confident times a mere 40 years ago…”
Mark Steyn in National Post December 24, 1999 [so 60 years ago now and the cultural and intellectual situation has not improved]
In my latest Loonie Politics column I render “We Three Kings” if they were bearing Grit Red, Tory Blue and Dipper Orange… and prefer the original.
“The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things March 2000
“Politicians are not going to get any smarter. Politicians are not going to get any nicer.”
Two entries in my ongoing work-in-progress “Robson’s Rules of History”, these two both dating to some point in the autumn of 1997. [I submit that thus far I have been proven sadly correct.]
In my latest National Post column, I write to Santa listing things I could really do without this year… and they all come from the government.
“Liberty is traditional and conservative; it remembers its legends and its heroes. But tyranny is always young and seemingly innocent, and asks us to forget the past.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News December 30, 1911, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)