In my latest Epoch Times column I say the recent riots in Ireland are a warning sign about what happens when normal people feel that their core concerns are deliberately excluded from the political process.
“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is a part of yourself. What isn’t a part of ourselves doesn’t hurt us.”
Herman Hesse in Demian, quoted by John Thompson in Mackenzie Newsletter #31 January 1998
“an early version of Horace’s carpe diem advice: ‘Seize time by the forelock.”
Pittacus of Mytilene (c. 650-570 BC) “a moderate democratic reformer…. [in] Mytilene, the chief city of the island of Lesbos” in Peter D’Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish, What are the Seven Wonders of the World? and 100 Other Great Cultural Lists – Fully Explicated. [Incidentally in the 3rd Nero Wolfe novel, The Rubber Band, the early supposedly non-bookish Archie Goodwin at one point asks Wolfe “Are you going to grab time by the forelock?”
“The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not. Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican. The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of God. Jesus Christ was crucified, it may be remembered, not because of anything he said about God, but on a charge of saying that a man could in three days pull down and rebuild the Temple. [Mt 26:61, Mk 14:58, Jn 2:19] Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness. The prophet who is stoned is not a brawler or a marplot. He is simply a rejected lover. He suffers from an unrequited attachment to things in general. (Introduction to The Defendant)”
“GKC on Scripture * Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022).
“The holidays: it’s a wonderful time... to lose your mind and go broke!”
An ad for OfficeMax on Channel 15 in Ottawa November 27, 1995 [late in a Monday Night Football broadcast].
In my latest Loonie Politics column I denounce the PM’s characteristic blend of self-importance and moral blindness on the Middle East.
“Life is a drama not a process. If there is only one thing that I could wish to explain with a perfect clarity and force and truth before I die it is that: life is a drama, not a process.”
Malcolm Muggeridge in a 1980 letter, in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge
“A wholesome regard for the memory of great men of long ago is the best assurance to a people of a continuation of great men to come, who shall be able to instruct, to lead, and to inspire.”
Calvin Coolidge, quoted in National Review January 28, 2002