“Commentators on the political scene tend in retrospect to regard the figures who emerge into prominence as totally derisory. Understandably so. It is extremely difficult, as I know from personal experience, to spend time with one or other of them without reaching the conclusion that some accomplished clown like Peter Sellers has substituted for him.”
Malcolm Muggeridge in 1972 in Chronicles of Wasted Time, in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge
“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.