“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Napoleon Bonaparte, widely cited online and apparently authentic (see for instance https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/napoleon-bonaparte-quotes).
“In the second half of A Preface to Paradise Lost, [C.S.] Lewis defended his approach to literary criticism and the artistry of Milton against the recent trend in literary theory represented by I.A. Richards, D.G. James, and T.S. Eliot. His opponents deplored the stock responses to moral questions they found in Paradise Lost. Lewis countered that society would do well to recover Milton's stock responses to pride, treachery, pain, and death.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
“If your mother says she loves you, check it out. That’s what the old cigar-chewing night editors in the city room used to say when I was a cub.”
[My bibliographic note to myself for this one is “Evers MW” but there’s no such entry in my actual bibliographic file for any book I’ve read so I have no idea what it means. The sentiment is in any case widespread regarding old-time journalism.]
In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that our politicians are dangerously helpless in the face of explicit support for antisemitic terrorism not from active malevolence but because it’s a form of evil their woke “paradigm” or worldview can’t process… yet.
In my latest Epoch Times column I deplore politicians’ self-destructive fixation on what they claim they’re going to do instead of how they think they might be able to do it.
“To have no philosophy is to have a bad philosophy.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis [quoting a letter around Christmas 1928 to his brother Warren (“Warnie”) in China in which Lewis insisted that the line was original with him].
“It was not the use of science that bothered [C.S.] Lewis but its misuse. The danger lay not with the sciences but with the humanities, which had fallen to pieces after World War I and abandoned their function in preserving the concepts of right, wrong, true, false, and beautiful. Poetry no longer made sense, music no longer had melodies, novels no longer had plots, paintings no longer were pictures, and the vast public ceased to be interested in the arts.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
“It is impossible for someone like me who is not totally immersed in these questions to judge to what extent Aboriginal people sincerely wish to perpetuate in large measure, though with modern benefits, the lives of their ancestors. I doubt if the alternatives were clearly laid out, a majority of Indigenous people would choose to live nomadic lives tribally and eating fish and game. But whether it is a tactical masquerade to maximize compensation and reparations or a sincere commitment, native Canadians at the very least have a right not to be treated as if they were immigrants from a foreign and much different country. It hardly needs emphasis that they and their ancestral civilization antedated the arrival of the now overwhelming majority of Canadians of overseas ancestry, and as a now well recognized natural right, they’re entitled to preserve as much as they wish of their traditional civilization, as long as it does not violate fundamental principles of Canadian life.”
Conrad Black in National Post April 6, 2024