In my latest Epoch Times column I say Bill Blair’s smug stonewalling over the latest allegations of long delays in approving a warrant show that the federal Liberals are still flailing as this breaking scandal moves faster than they can Observe, Orient, Decide and Act.
“My personal favourite [among her late father’s many fine turns of phrase]… his technical term for fixing any appliance by means of a quick smack on the top or side: ‘Repair Scheme Number One.’”
Jean Mills in Globe & Mail June 18, 2004
“Even given his concern for sparrows, the likelihood of God being concerned with hijabs seems small…. What must God think of all this [the Asmahan Mansour controversy]? Of one thing I am certain: whatever he turns out to be will bear no resemblance to the god imagined by any of the religions I know, ancient or modern, mono- or polytheistic. My belief in God is persistent and I pray. I know not to what I pray – Paul Johnson’s wonderful book The Quest for God tells me that my prayers are to a God that hears everything, but while I want to believe that, I have great difficulty doing so…. There are few things as ridiculous as a bunch of apes trying to be spiritual. If eventually we get to meet or understand the nature of God before or after our death, I think the likelihood of his concerns overlapping those of any religion to be very small.”
Barbara Amiel in Maclean’s March 19, 2007, very certain that everyone else’s certainty about God is laughably wrong and hers is totally right.
“O, I smell false Latin.”
Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost
“In our day the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has written powerfully about the ‘second naïveté’ that is the mark of true faith. A century earlier, Kierkegaard wrote about ‘the second immediacy,’ the possibility of being a child or youth for the second time.”
Richard John Neuhaus, “Kierkegaard for Grownups,” in First Things #146 (October 2004)
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us.”
Aldous Huxley quoted in Andrew Roberts “Introduction” in Andrew Roberts, ed., What Might Have Been (as from a letter written in 1959) and also by managing editor Geoffrey Stevens in Maclean’s April 19, 1999
In my latest National Post column I say the tricksy maneuvering over the U.S. debt ceiling, in which the one problem no one seems able address is chronic overspending, reminds me uncomfortably of late ancien régime France.
“We have been driven into a widespread system of arbitrary and tyrannical control over our economic life not because ‘economic laws are not working the way they used to,’ not because the classical medicine cannot, if properly applied, halt inflation, but because the public at large has been led to expect standards of performance that as economists we do not know how to achieve.”
Milton Friedman’s 1971 address to American Economic Association quoted in Leonard Silk The Economists