“Les vieux fous sont plus fous que les jeunes.”
Réflexions morales #444 in La Rochefoucauld Maximes
In my latest Loonie Politics column I use the stream of meaningless vainglorious press releases from the G7 summit to indicate the trap our political class has fallen into, becoming so good at soothing vapouring that it has become a habit of mind rather than merely of tongue.
“In a recent British study of ‘happy’ professions, hairdressing topped the list, reports The Independent on Sunday. Next happiest were the clergy, chefs, beauticians, plumbers and mechanics.”
“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail October 6, 2005 [and it strikes me that of these professions all but the clergy work with their hands on physical objects]
“inevitably, to attempt the tracing of Christianity’s impact on the world is to cover the rise and fall of empires, the actions of bishops and kings, the arguments of theologians, the course of revolutions, the planting of crosses around the world. It is, in particular, to focus on the doings of men. Yet that hardly tells the whole story. I have written much in this book about churches, and monasteries, and universities; but these were never where the mass of the Christian people were most influentially shaped. It was always in the home that children were likeliest to absorb the revolutionary teachings that, over the course of two thousand years, have come to be so taken for granted as almost to seem human nature. The Christian revolution was wrought above all at the knees of women.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [in context of his own saintly though herself childless godmother, a teacher]
“The most renowned of Etruria’s products is its pottery. Every museum abounds in it, setting the weary navigator of ceramic halls to wonder what unseen perfection exonerates these stores. Etruscan vases, when they are not clearly copies of Greek forms, are mediocre in design, crude in execution, barbarous in ornament. No other art has produced so many distortions of the human frame, so many hideous masks, uncouth animals, monstrous demons, and terrifying gods.... All in all, the robbers were justified who, when they rifled Etruscan tombs, left so much of the pottery.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“I was drawn to Chesterton for many reasons. First of all, he delighted me. Even before I understood him. I knew this man was on my side. Or rather, I knew I was on his side. Or rather, I knew I wanted to be on his side. I was enchanted by his ability to state the truth so succinctly and potently and pleasingly plain. But I never thought in those early days that the pleasure of reading Chesterton would prove to be so important. To read Chesterton is to want to repeat him.”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 [and as any even semi-regular reader of these Words Worth Noting is well aware, I know the feeling]
In my latest National Post column I argue that our government’s, and our chattering classes’, material and moral feebleness on the Middle East conflict stems as usual from mental feebleness, in this case a lack of clarity or concentration either on geopolitics or Israel’s place in history.
In my latest Epoch Times column I warn that we must rearm intellectually before we can rearm materially or do anything with our Armed Forces if we somehow conjure one up.