“One who excels in traveling leaves no wheel tracks;/ One who excels in speech makes no slips;/ One who excels in reckoning uses no counting rods;/ One who excels in shutting uses no bolts yet what he has shut cannot be opened;/ One who excels in tying uses no cords yet what he has tied cannot be undone.”
Lao Tzu I.XXVII.60
“The Hero does not regard the forest in which the dragon lurks as evil. Nor do I. I find that the world is on the whole a very jolly place, with inns and good fellowship. But try to justify the distinction: the good forest, the evil dragon; and you must have a philosophy.”
G.K. Chesterton in an interview with W.R. Titterton, in Titterton’s GKC: A Portrait (1936), the first Chesterton biography, reprinted in part at least in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“This is hilarious. Anti-Israel whack jobs shut down Ottawa’s Pride Parade… that’s not the hilarious part (tho it’s fun to watch intersectional rock paper scissors)…the hilarious part is @globeandmail headline: ‘Pride parade cancelled after *coinciding* with pro-Palestine rally’”
Jonathan Kay on X 24/8/25 [https://x.com/jonkay/status/1959774800488153489] (my favourite bit being “intersectional rock paper scissors”)
“The division now is between those who want Western Civilization to continue and those who don’t... this is the moment when the West will either pull itself together or go over the edge of the cultural cliff.”
Melanie Phillips in The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, quoted by Chuck Chalberg reviewing the book in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
In my latest National Post column I expand on Chris Selley’s alarming insight that Canadian politicians and voters consistently act as if nothing mattered.
“Much history-telling casts our ancestors as stupid or villainous, who deserve our pity and scorn accordingly. This helps us swallow contemporary notions of ourselves, which are unheroic and uninteresting.”
Christopher Jolliffe “The Attack on ANZAC Day” in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)
“If you leave your children a world where you never stood up, they’ll inherit one where they can’t.”
Emailed as an image and without attribution by a friend Sept. 8, 2025
“Again and again in 1967 we came across a statement said to be a Balinese proverb (sometimes a Balinese potter’s answer to an anthropologist’s question) to the effect that we Balinese ‘have no art, we just do everything as well as we can.’”
Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History [I doubt the authenticity of this proverb but it is both revealing of the mindset at the time and also good advice up to a point].