“I have a pretty worrying hunch that despite all the talk of Team Canada and visits to D.C., our premiers aren’t doing much to get this country battle ready. Too many of them, after a career in Canadian politics, are probably too stuck in their ways of ‘the announcement is the plan.’”

Matt Gurney in The Line Feb. 13, 2025 [https://www.readtheline.ca/p/matt-gurney-i-hereby-propose-the]. [I emailed him to ask if it was original and he replied “I think it’s original to me” but added that it had evolved from conversations with his colleagues, especially Jen Gerson]

In my latest Epoch Times column I say from coast to coast Canada is turning away from trusting the people and abandoning self-government for meddlesome ineffective presumption.

“Compaq FAQ: Where do I find the ‘Any’ key on my keyboard? (FAQ2859) The term ‘any key’ does not refer to a particular key on the keyboard. It simply means to strike any one of the keys on your keyboard or handheld screen.”

http://web14.compaq.com/falco/detail.asp?FAQnum=FAQ2859 as of Jan. 6, 2002, forwarded by a suitably appalled friend

“Find a job you like and you add five days to every week.”

H. Jackson Brown, emailed by a friend and widely cited online

“The general picture of Syria under Roman rule is one of prosperity more continuous than in any other province. Most of the workers were freeman, except in domestic service. The upper classes were Hellenized, the lower remained Oriental; in the same town Greek philosophers rubbed elbows with temple prostitutes and emasculated priests; and even till Hadrian children were now and then offered as sacrifices to the gods.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Our knowledge of the Lyons persecutions [in or very shortly after 177 AD] comes from a letter of ‘the servants of Christ at Lugdunum and Vienna in Gaul, to the brethren in Asia and Phrygia,’ preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, v, 1. Some exaggeration may have crept into the report.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Protestants had been insisting on the correctness of their own readings of scripture, their own understandings of God’s purpose, since the time of Luther’s confrontation with Cajetan. Now, in the person of Spinoza, this tradition had begun to cannibalise itself.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“‘The two greatest problems in history,’ says a brilliant scholar of our time, are ‘how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall.’ We may come nearer to understanding them if we remember that the fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause but many, and was not an event but a process spread over 300 years. Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell. A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars. Christian writers were keenly appreciative of this decay.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ