“As the historian Forrest McDonald pointed out, Filmer never persuaded anyone by eloquence or logic, since he possessed neither.”
Richard Brookheiser in National Review February 22, 1999 [Filmer being the 17th-century English Tory essayist Robert Filmer, the target of John Locke’s now mostly unread First Treatise of Government, which is now mostly unread in significant measure because it demolished Filmer so completely that nobody now remembers him]
“I could go on and on.” “We know.”
Me on March 14 2015 at an event where a speaker used the first phrase and it was only with great difficulty that I restrained myself from shouting out the second.
“Economists’ work is often criticized as being ‘useful as a chocolate teapot,’ The Economist magazine wrote.”
Ottawa Citizen October 25, 1997 (though it has occurred to me since that (a) you could eat a chocolate teapot and (b) what’s really wrong with economists’ work isn’t that it’s not useful, it’s that people don’t want to hear about it... but it’s still a lovely metaphor).
In my latest Loonie Politics column I welcome the youth of tomorrow’s future back to the dismal reality of today’s schooling with an assignment to write an essay on what they’d really do if they were in charge, and why it would be so different from what they promised and expected to do.
“A radioactive isotope of tedium.”
Another of my own, from February 2, 2004, on reading an exceptionally dull column.
“Salt: An Epicure’s Delight”, “Classic Wines of Estonia”, “Flemish Weaving the Traditional Way”.
The in-flight magazine articles the characters use to sedate themselves in Red Dwarf “Dimension Jump” (the Ace Rimmer episode).
“The Convoy Conference prior to our sailing was held ashore at Cardiff and was so particularly dull and uninformative that the Flag Officer Cardiff fell sound asleep. The Conference certainly had the merit that it could not possibly have alarmed the Masters of the merchant ships who were being briefed for the venture.”
Bob Whinney, The U-Boat Peril: A Fight for Survival (regarding a convoy that sailed on June 5 to help supply the U.S. beaches on D-Day).
“The Singular Mark Twain [by Fred Kaplan] arouses in the reader an urgently fugitive instinct, as at the approach of an unpolished yet tenacious raconteur.”
Christopher Hitchens panning the book in The Atlantic Monthly November 2003