“If the eighteenth century claimed to be the Age of Reason, nobody can deny the claim of the twentieth century to be the Age of Unreason.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly, Nov. 1, 1930, as header quotation on Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
In my latest Epoch Times column I complain that Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford subsidizing EV manufacturing in Canada are repeating very old economic mistakes in an unaffordable fog of smug ignorance.
“They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.”
“Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), English author” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail Dec. 17, 2010
“One of them [a crook planning to rob a Vegas casino in the Donald Westlake novel What’s The Worst Thing That Could Happen?] says he has a lot of ideas, but Westlake writes: ‘A whole lot of ideas isn’t a plan.… Ideas without a plan is usually just enough boulders to get you into the deep part of the stream, and no way to get back.’”
George F. Will in National Post Dec. 5, 2001 [not clear if it’s his elision or Westlake’s]
“We like to ask ‘If there is a God, why is there any evil?’ Here is a better question: If there isn’t a God, why is there any good?”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]
“Hollywood’s the kind of place where they stick a knife in your back and then have you arrested for carrying a concealed weapon.”
Philip Marlow, quoted on USA Network Feb. 19, 1989
In my latest Loonie Politics column I cite the tragic case of Ottawa’s Dow’s Lake to illustrate the way trendy modern urban “densification” theory is wrecking nature in the name of fighting climate change.
“As the classical writers knew – Aristotle knew it, Cicero knew it, Thomas Aquinas wrote of it with great insight – the virtues are interconnected. People are confused about this fact because a person who is full of vices might have some admirable qualities. As a man I knew who was sentenced to prison for embezzling put it, ‘You meet some of the nicest people in prison.’ But the interconnection of virtues doesn’t imply that we can’t possess even a particle of virtue unless we possess complete virtue. What it does imply is that there is no such thing as a person who fails in just one virtue. Anything wrong in one moral dimension does damage in the other ones too.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” April 17, 2023 [https://undergroundthomist.org/antipasto]