In my latest Epoch Times column I challenge Canadians, especially those in positions of authority, to stop embracing and even enforcing mediocrity… starting by admitting they have a problem.
“‘Because you don’t love mankind, that’s why!’ ‘I love mankind… it’s people I can’t stand!!’”
Lucy and Linus at the end of a Peanuts strip (of which only these two panels appear as the illustration on story in Maclean’s May 15, 2006).
Robson’s Rules of History: Anything with “People’s” in the name is a bad thing.
One of mine, obviously, from October 29, 1997 (I did not record what specific entity or incident prompted the thought)
“Woke /wōk/informal • US (adj.) A state of awareness only achieved by those dumb enough to find injustice in everything except their own behavior.”
Comment by Stewart Read on the Climate Discussion Nexus “Pinker To The Rescue” Readout video
“Boredom can literally kill you, according to an excellent new little book on the subject, published this week… Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom... was inspired to write the book by a friend who killed himself out of boredom, and Mr. Svendsen shows how boredom, or the escape from boredom, is a much greater incitement to action than is excitement. People get drunk out of boredom; people give up reading newspaper articles such as this one out of boredom; people contract unwise sexual encounters out of boredom. But the dreadful thing is that even sex ends up boring, according to Mr. Svendsen. There is, in fact, a psychological term for it, he says: taedium sexualitatis.... Humans seem to be unfairly picked out for boredom, as we are for drunkenness and suicide, lemmings notwithstanding. Animals, medical studies apparently show, can be understimulated, but not bored. And, even worse, modern humans seem to be particularly prey … The word ‘boring’ in the dreary sense, as opposed to the drilling water pipes sense was used for the first time in England only in the 1760s. That’s not to say that people weren’t bored before 1760, just that there was a European explosion of boredom at about that time. The Germans invented their word for boredom, Langeweile, at the same time. And it was only with late-18th-century Romanticism that the demand got going for life to be interesting. The obsession has boomed ever since. Nowadays, it is hard to think of a time when one is not subject to at least one of the four types … Mr. Svendsen comes up with: boredom of situation, such as being trapped on a train without a book; boredom of satiety, when you have too much of a good thing; existential boredom, where you’ve just had enough of the world; and creative boredom, when you’re forced to come up with something new such as, say, an interesting item in a newspaper article.”
An author whose name I did not record in the Ottawa Citizen March 12, 2005
“If anyone who wanders all day arrives toward evening, it is enough.”
Petrarch, quoted by Schopenhauer, according to a writer whose name I did not record in The New Republic March 4, 1991
“The moral will as our human center! How disappointing a message this must sound to our modern ears! How odd and simpleminded… above all, how tame a cause this is to argue, how prosaic and stodgy, how positively hackneyed and old-hat! Ours is an age of sensational discoveries…”
William Barrett The Illusion of Technique
He’d “sooner turn you into a lampshade than give you the steam off his shit.”
Tom Kakonis Double Down (the opinion of one Jewish character about the German main villain in this seamy novel - and yes, it breaks my rule about vulgarity but once in a while it’s appropriate)