people-from-ottawa

"I used to be a crime reporter for a newspaper in a midsize Canadian city. We liked to say we had a population of a million people, but that figure included farming communities an hour's drive from downtown. For me, a more relevant statistic was the murder rate. There were a steady fifteen or twenty a year, maybe twenty-five if things were particularly good, at least good from a crime reporter's point of view. Mine was a foul profession. The object was to pry into the dark corners of life and drag out all that was vile and diseased for public contemplation: an infant girl raped with a flashlight, a toddler drowned in a backyard swimming pool while the baby-sitter napped, a young father crushed by a rowdy car of drunken teens. This was the daily routine, a steady stream of sorrow that gradually colored my vision of humanity and dulled my sense of compassion."

"2. , , Paris, France has been running what he calls "a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore" for 50 years. His store has long been a literary hub, attracting the likes of Henry Miller, Richard Wright, and William Burroughs. More importantly, George has been inviting people to live in his shop from its very first days. There are now 13 beds among the books, and he says that more than 40,000 people have slept there at one time or another. All he asks is that you make your bed in the morning, help out in the shop, and read a book a day. After living here for five months, I was inspired to write my own book about the place."

"is the anti-Paris. Lodged among the rocky cliffs on France's southern coast, it is a brash and sun-scoured city. Instead of the refined culture and polished façades of the capital, this sweaty port exudes a raw humanity difficult to find in the north. There is little of the wealth of Paris and none of the rush; in Marseille, it is still custom to take a in the afternoon and to spend the early evening sipping apéros under the cooling sky."

"During my four months at the bookstore, I read over one hundred and fifty books. ... That's the biggest luxury in life, right? Time. To have that time to be in one place to read ... or whatever you want — whatever your passion is."

"I hope that the CCCB will continue to reach out to the rest of the world; it would be my hope that the conference will continue to have both a missionary spirit as well as a concern for the peace and well-being of our brothers and sisters elsewhere. This international outreach of the conference is a way of showing our solidarity with our brother bishops, many of whom minister under very difficult circumstances."

"I think we have to make a very important distinction between belief and knowledge. And this is something that I think is lost these days, particularly in the news media. There's actually a difference between (and we should draw attention to it when it's transgressed) [...] what we know [and] what we're expected to believe, or told to believe."

"Canada harbours its own disgraceful legacy. Down through the decades, scores of federal and provincial laws isolated, dispossessed and ghettoized one racial or ethnic minority after another. Asians weren't allowed to vote in Canada until the late 1940s; federally-registered Indians had to wait until 1960... For Canada’s young Aboriginal people, it’s not clear that the arc of the moral universe is even bending in their direction at all."

"There is something very strange and new and different that is occupying all the places where the left used to be and so these stories, it didn't really matter that they weren't true but they were weaponized, if you like, in this narrative about Canada as an irredeemably racist white colonial apartheid settler state."

"have no recourse to anything like an . The Communist Party decides if you’re guilty or innocent. The conviction rate stands in excess of 98 per cent. Torture and are commonplace. Xi has lately embarked on a vicious campaign of harassment and intimidation of activists, ethnic and religious minorities, and feminists. Scores of human rights lawyers have been rounded up and jailed."

"In these impoverished conditions, it's much easier for journalists to construe events in such a way as to uphold an ideologically rigid "narrative" than to go about the hard work of building true stories from the construction material of hard facts."

"What I worry about is that the truth doesn't matter, and I think this is something that has changed from 20 years ago, it's not just that the truth doesn't matter anymore, it's that it doesn't matter that the truth doesn't matter anymore. [...] I also think that people really do want some kind of an honest assessment of things that are important. Of something grounded in fact. I think that is something that is actually necessary for a liberal democracy to function."

"In truth, modern life requires many people of talent and intelligence to run big institutions, including governments. Others resent their quality wherever they find it. They see it as oppressive. Then Donald Trump came before them and sneered at government leadership, in a style that had nothing to do with talent or intelligence.... To accomplish this, his followers needed only to mark a ballot. Soon he looked like the man they always needed. In the future, this strategy may well be called Trumpism. For now, American journalists call it populism."

"Isolationism as a stream of thought was hibernating. It was rarely articulated, but passionately held, waiting for someone like Trump to lead it. Isolationists were called the “silent majority” in Richard Nixon’s days — even though Nixon was an internationalist, who built a strong relationship with China. Trump knew how to exploit the silent majority’s mix of racism, grievances and xenophobia. He appealed to the vast national community of chronic blamers, anxious to locate the cause of American problems in China, thereby executing a double play of racism and xenophobia."

"His rise to the status of Republican presidential candidate will stand as a unique historic achievement."

"By winning his party’s nomination, Trump has rewritten the rules. Until this year, no openly racist candidate in modern times has reached such a height in American national politics. Trump has carelessly, perhaps jubilantly, maligned Mexicans and Muslims. ... His success results from sheer intuition. He realized, as others did not, that there are many thousands of people ready to vote for a candidate preaching anti-Mexican, anti-Muslin bigotry, while also blaming America’s failures on the Chinese and on free trade."

"enlightenment should be a human right."

"Certainty is usually a sign of pathology."

"Then there were his encounters with the two mystics. Trudeau met Mounier only once, according to the Nemnis; and according to John English, he had only one direct encounter with Teilhard de Chardin."

"No rebellious heart is ever at ease with paths established by others."

"Charisma is a sign of the calling. Saints and pilgrims are defiantly moved by it."

"There is, it seems, an unbridgeable chasm between the concerns of a Sri Aurobindo and a Pat Robertson."

"The Trojan War without Homer was nothing more than a battle over trade routes."

"May the ability to see many points of view keep us gentle."

"Threaten the balances of justice and you threaten the potential enlargements of mind and soul. Therefore justice is part of the safeguarding of the heart."

"Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way."

"It began in images and it ended in symbolism."

"There must be engagement: there must be protest."

"Canada is like several puzzles that we are all working on at the same time. Everyone has a part to add, but no one has seen the whole picture yet."

"We have to learn how to contact one another over an enormous land space, across five-and-a-half time zones, in what as once a wilderness of scattered settlements, in what is now a sprawl of suburban edge cities and satellite towns. Technology forges connections and disconnections here."

"Alienation and loneliness plant the seeds for rebellion and consciousness."

"Electrical fire and the fire of greed kindle economies. In that flux, nations become digitized commodities on stock-exchange floors and on investors' rating screens. A country becomes a product to be rated for its obedience to paying of deficits and debts."

"Canada may be fast-forwarding, jump starting, into a new pattern, a model of communication linkages, a civilization that is more than a grab for power and dominance, a place that could channel the fires of the global wirings, where political alliances are subject to electrical ebb and flow, and the alchemical cultivations of imagination and perception, of the self, could precail of the ideology of capital."

"A just society will appear less spectacular, and less clearly defined, than a society with totalitarian leadership, theocratic goals."

"If you make things sound inoffensively obvious, then it is likely that no one will listen."

"If our dreams can last, then we could turn our time and place to gold."

"The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be."

"Here I find a puzzle of great beauty: Canada works well in practice, but just doesn't work out in theory."

"Passion was animal flesh, raw desire gnawing and ripping at its early limitations. These passions were to be feared only if undirected by the conscience of the higher self. Mind was the key to the process of enlightenment. Hence reason was the first principle, light itself."

"Democracies should be a delirium of choices - more options, not fewer; more avenues to travel, not fewer."

"The myth of Canada, its hidden story, is of a contemplative country, a place of inwardness, where people can question the idea of nationhood and ponder what values we wish to see expressed and achieved, and what solitudes of identity and reverie we wish to preserve."

"The origin of corruption in politics is surely in the thought that you are the bearer of ultimate virtue."

"...Danny Aykroyd went his own way when I became head of Lorimar Pictures in 1987. He said, "I can't understand the head of a management company also running a studio. There's something wrong about it." I told Danny it could only work in his favor, but he laughed. He's such a straight citizen. Maybe he was right. But with no paper to haggle over, the parting was friendly. And he's such a good guy that although I haven't represented him in years, every month he sends the Blues Brothers records' royalties I'm due, or a commission on an old acting job. Sometimes the check is for $17. Doesn't matter. I love that continuity and caring and respect."

"You look at the floor and see the floor. I look at the floor and see molecules."

"You know, even when the material wasn't so good, I've gotten to work with the greats, and I've always given it my best shot. I'm satisfied with my work. I could stop tomorrow, and if Bright Young Things was my last role, I could say I tidied it up with dignity."

"I was never into the powders or pills. I tried it all but didn't like that clenched-teeth feeling. I didn't like the "I'm a palpitating rabbit and I'm gonna solve the world's problems" feeling either. I drank some beer. I'm still here."

"Greetings and death to our enemies."

"Well, the common enemy in North America is the Western consumer. The consumer has driven oil up to $50.00 a barrel so we have to have these wars. I think it's incumbent upon us to."

"You're from the isle of ghosts and, as you know, there are ghosts walking around all over the place over there. Loads of people have seen them, heard a voice or felt the cold temperature. I believe that they are between here and there, that they exist between the fourth and the fifth dimension and that they visit us frequently."

"I am a Spiritualist, a proud wearer of the Spiritualist badge. Mediums and psychic research have gone on for many, many years."

"Last Night of the World"