“The most renowned of Etruria’s products is its pottery. Every museum abounds in it, setting the weary navigator of ceramic halls to wonder what unseen perfection exonerates these stores. Etruscan vases, when they are not clearly copies of Greek forms, are mediocre in design, crude in execution, barbarous in ornament. No other art has produced so many distortions of the human frame, so many hideous masks, uncouth animals, monstrous demons, and terrifying gods.... All in all, the robbers were justified who, when they rifled Etruscan tombs, left so much of the pottery.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“I was drawn to Chesterton for many reasons. First of all, he delighted me. Even before I understood him. I knew this man was on my side. Or rather, I knew I was on his side. Or rather, I knew I wanted to be on his side. I was enchanted by his ability to state the truth so succinctly and potently and pleasingly plain. But I never thought in those early days that the pleasure of reading Chesterton would prove to be so important. To read Chesterton is to want to repeat him.”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 [and as any even semi-regular reader of these Words Worth Noting is well aware, I know the feeling]

In my latest National Post column I argue that our government’s, and our chattering classes’, material and moral feebleness on the Middle East conflict stems as usual from mental feebleness, in this case a lack of clarity or concentration either on geopolitics or Israel’s place in history.

In my latest Epoch Times column I warn that we must rearm intellectually before we can rearm materially or do anything with our Armed Forces if we somehow conjure one up.

“Benito Mussolini, an erstwhile socialist whose reading of Nietzsche had led him, by the end of the Great War, to dream of forming a new breed of man, an elite worthy of a fascist state, cast himself both as Caesar and as the face of a gleaming future. From the fusion of ancient and modern, mounted by the white-hot genius of his leadership, there was to emerge a new Italy. Whether greeting the massed ranks of his followers with a Roman salute or piloting an aircraft, Mussolini posed in ways that consciously sought to erase the entire span of Christian history. Although, in a country as profoundly Catholic as Italy, he had little choice but to cede a measure of autonomy to the Church, his ultimate aim was to subordinate it utterly, to render it the handmaid of the fascist state. Mussolini’s more strident followers exalted nakedly in this goal. ‘Yes indeed, we are totalitarians! We want to be from morning to evening, without distracting thoughts.’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.”

Emailed without attribution by a friend

“Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.”

“Rod St. Denis, Sudbury, Ont.” quoted as “Your morning smile” in Globe & Mail November 29, 2006

“‘My friends, I have no more against work than the next man,’ Bobby [O’Brien, who was totally lazy] would reply. ‘In fact, nothing fascinates me more than work. I can sit here and watch it all day, if you’ll only give me the chance.’”

“The Week of Sundays,” called just “this old tale”, in William Bennett The Book of Virtues [but it owes a lot, perhaps too much, to a similar line from Jerome K. Jerome]