In my latest Loonie Politics column I say all the excitement about Zohran Mamdani is misplaced, not because he isn’t potentially important but because what matters isn’t whether he wins a primary or even the New York general mayoral election. It’s what happens if and when he tries to govern and what the result tells us about the soundness or insanity of his principles.
“Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly”
Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria quoted in Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“the phrase that I use, which is – it’s not original – ‘You can love your job but your job is not going to love you back.’”
Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines, “the woman who sold Oprah Winfrey on the idea of starting a magazine”, former president and publisher of USA Today and author of the book Basic Black: The Essential Guide for getting Ahead at Work (and in Life), in an interview with Kenneth Whyte in Maclean’s December 31, 2007
“Weak if we were and foolish/ Not thus we failed, not thus;/ When that black Baal blocked the heavens/ He had no hymns from us.”
The introductory poem in G.K Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton
“The drivers ahead of us appear to be descended from monkeys who weren’t making it as monkeys.”
Me in traffic on the afternoon of December 17, 2024
In my latest Epoch Times column I discuss the vexed question of where the government is going to find more than $100 billion extra to meet the defence spending commitment the Prime Minister blithely made.
“For admirers, the unusual challenge is to popularize a man who didn’t lie, steal or cheat on his wife. What do they say?”
Andrew Cohen about George Washington in Globe & Mail March 3, 1999
“That the issue of sexual morality should become a vehicle of rebellion against bourgeois values for the modern movement was inevitable. In the art of Gustav Klimt, in the early operas of Richard Strauss, in the plays of Frank Wedekind, in the personal antics of Verlaine, Tchaikovsky, and Wilde, and even in the relaxed morality of the German youth movement, a motif of eroticism dominated the search for newness and change. In the United States Max Eastman shouted, ‘Lust is sacred!’ The sexual rebel, particularly the homosexual, became a central figure in the imagery of revolt, especially after the ignominious treatment Oscar Wilde received at the hands of the establishment. Of her Bloomsbury circle of gentle rebels Virginia Woolf said, ‘the word bugger was never far from our lips.’ Andre Gide, after a long struggle with himself, denounced publicly le mensonge des moeurs, the moral life, and admitted his own predilections. Passion and love, he had concluded, were mutually exclusive. And passion was much purer than love. Diaghilev’s sexual proclivities were well known, and he made no attempt to mask them; quite the reverse. Stravinsky said later that Diaghilev’s entourage was ‘a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard.’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era [so the modern rebellion over the issue of sexual morality is actually stale and reactionary]