“Don’t ask why children need to see drag queens; Ask yourself why drag queens want an audience of children!”
Emailed by a friend July 30, 2022 as part of an email roundup, without attribution.
“The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
William Morris, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email teaser August 20, 2022
In my latest Epoch Times column I say all the people who thought replacing the McGuinty Liberals with “Conservatives” would make a difference to Ontario’s big-government path have been sorely disappointed.
“At age seven, the much-tutored [future Queen] Victoria was reading British classics, perfecting her German and learning French. However, her frustrated piano master one day noted, ‘There is no royal road to music, Princess. You must practise like everybody else.’ Victoria slammed the piano shut. ‘There! You see there is no must about it!’”
Donna Jacobs “Monday Morning” in Ottawa Citizen May 21, 2007
“Science in the modern sense consists not in a man trying to know what he does not know, but in his pretending not to know what he does know.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News February 27, 1926, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022
“Meanderthal: A person who walks particularly slowly and aimlessly, often toting cellphones and delaying pedestrian or motor traffic.”
“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail January 6, 2006
“The final outcome of critical consciousness, however, need not be that we are sure of nothing. It can lead to our being graced with a ‘second naïveté.’ We are indebted to philosopher Paul Ricouer for that happy phrase….. Having come to recognize that things could theoretically be other than they are, we are brought to the perception that they are as we thought them to be; but on the far side of all our questioning, we know that in a way we did not know it before.”
Richard John Neuhaus Death on a Friday Afternoon [I believe it’s from that book though my notes were slightly cryptic and in any case it’s definitely Neuhaus]
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
Henry Ford on the witness stand in 1919 during his libel suit against the Chicago Tribune, quoted in Clifton Fadiman, ed., The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes [which as I may have complained before was in fact big and blue]. These words are the apparently origin of his supposed “History is bunk”, and I quote them not because I agree but on the contrary because they embodies a typical progressive fatuity that nothing ever mattered before yet what we do can matter by sheer force of will... and because I want to add that in The Illusion of Technique William Barrett quoted it as “History is the bunk”, which I find interesting because older uses of that term invariably seem to have it as “the bunk” and if anyone knows how or why it got shortened or what the original reference even was I would be interested.