“I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in.”
C.S. Lewis “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State: Is Progress Possible?” first published in The Observer July 20, 1958
In my latest National Post column I ask whether Jagmeet Singh and other prominent Canadian politicians can possibly be the buffoons they appear to be, and answer sadly yes.
“The next revolution is always perfect.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly Vol. 8 (September, 1928 – March, 1929) quoted in “Chesterton University An Introduction to the Writings of G.K. Chesterton by Dale Ahlquist” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22)
Claiming a special French “right to idleness”, radical eco-feminist Green MP Sandrine Rousseau said hard work was “essentially a Right-wing value”.
The Telegraph November 14, 2022 [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/14/french-have-got-even-lazier-study-shows-vast-majority-happy/]; I trust she did not overstrain herself writing that admission disguised as a boast.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the big problem with Canada’s federal ethics commissioner isn’t the Liberals making a mockery of the post, it’s that we’re trying to substitute technical expertise for character.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the 2023 federal budget is exactly what you’d expect from people who think we can’t afford not to spend beyond our means in good times and bad.
“Science in the modern sense consists not in a man trying to know what he does not know, but in his pretending not to know what he does know.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News February 27, 1926, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
Henry Ford on the witness stand in 1919 during his libel suit against the Chicago Tribune, quoted in Clifton Fadiman, ed., The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes [which as I may have complained before was in fact big and blue]. These words are the apparently origin of his supposed “History is bunk”, and I quote them not because I agree but on the contrary because they embodies a typical progressive fatuity that nothing ever mattered before yet what we do can matter by sheer force of will... and because I want to add that in The Illusion of Technique William Barrett quoted it as “History is the bunk”, which I find interesting because older uses of that term invariably seem to have it as “the bunk” and if anyone knows how or why it got shortened or what the original reference even was I would be interested.