“We never let a quarrel interrupt a good argument.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted as header quotation by Chris Chan in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the proposal to exempt Quebec MNAs from an oath of allegiance to our actual Constitution in favour of some pompous make-believe is a dangerous relativist attack on the rule of law.
In my latest Epoch Times column I contrast our supposed new strategy for dealing with Communist China’s aggression with the iconic American Cold War strategy document NSC-68 and ours comes off looking mentally, verbally and morally feeble.
“Over the centuries, historians and philosophers have put together a certain idea about how Western civilization developed. It began in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Arabs developed our numbers, the Phoenicians the first phonetic alphabet, the Greeks democracy, the Romans large-scale government, the Hebrews a single god and a system of morals, and the Christians a spirituality based on redemption and grounded in a vast international church. The Roman Empire fell and the Dark Ages descended, until the arrival of the Renaissance, then the Age if Science and the Enlightenment, colonialism, the romantic era, modernity, and perhaps something we now call the postmodern age. In this sketchy account, humanity passes civilization down the centuries like a baton in a relay race…. This account remains, up the present, the essential background to all discussions of western culture, even for those who dispute it. Critics may argue with this or that part of it, or rewrite bits of it: still, the master narrative remains, because we have not concocted a credible substitute.”
Robert Fulford The Triumph of Narrative
“As modern words are actually used, there is hardly a shade of difference left between meaning well and meaning nothing.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly October 25, 1934, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 1922 [and if you’re thinking wow, someone who could describe current conditions so exactly nearly a hundred years ago must have understood the underlying processes at work very well, I couldn’t agree more].
In my latest Epoch Times column I lament our Prime Minister’s inability to take Communist Chinese aggression seriously.
“It is only a more traditional spirit that is truly able to wander. The wild theorists of our time are quite unable to wander. When they talk of making new roads, they are only making new ruts. Each of them is necessarily imprisoned in his own curious cosmos.”
G.K. Chesterton's Introduction to “Fancies and Fads” quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022
“When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
Jonathan Swift, as “Quote of the Week” in Watt’s Up With That “Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #488” January 24, 2022