“In today’s broken world, especially with its broken education system, which is part of the reason for the broken world, nothing very great is being achieved. In fact, nearly nothing at all is being achieved when students can’t even achieve basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, much less studying great works of literature and philosophy, and learning the art of reason. The lack of achievement is because students are not being taught to focus on a truth that is outside of themselves. They’re being taught to focus on themselves – on their identity, on their rights and their entitlements, and are not taught anything to benefit their unformed and unfilled minds. In the meantime, they have a hunger for truth and goodness and beauty, and it is completely unsatisfied in a system that is designed to starve them of these things. As a result, they are left angry and depressed, but also inarticulate – because they have not been taught to be articulate – so they cannot even express their frustration. And they collapse into their lonely inner world.”

David Warren in Ottawa Citizen Nov. 29, 2006

This week I was on the National Post “Full Comment” podcast with Brian Lilley to talk about Donald Trump, Canada, and the sometimes unruly revenge of normal people.

“Of course, it would be worth while to pay a big price to get a well-informed people. At the present moment we are paying an abominably big price to get a more and more ill-informed people.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly, as header quotation on Dale Ahlquist “Chesterton University” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)

“Scholars have spread much darkness” “soon we shall know nothing at all”

Mark Twain, quoted by Nicholas Davidson in Chronicles magazine September 1988 [and it can be found elsewhere online but nobody seems to know what connected the two halves and no one offers a more detailed source; so if he did not say it, and maybe he did not, he missed a good chance].

In my latest Loonie Politics column I take up my dusty cudgel on the crucial point that our whole system of government crumples if the legislators we elect cannot control the executive we do not elect. It was true in the days of Bad King John and George III, and it’s true in those of Justin Trudeau.

“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].

“‘Like the land of the Brobdingnagians,’ said Turnbull, smiling. ‘Oh, Where is that?’ said MacIan. Turnbull said bitterly, ‘In a book,’ and the silence fell suddenly between them again.”

G.K. Chesterton The Ball and the Cross, as header quotation on David Beresford in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)

“If you think wrong, you go wrong.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News September 12, 1914, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008)