Richard Gwyn > Quotes

“My attic study is full of books, around a thousand of them, of which I might have read a half, the others lie in wait; some were bought years ago and are destined to remain unread, others were consumed as soon as I brought them home. Some , more ancient acquisitions, glare back at me accusingly, claiming their right to be read, to be given the chance to relieve me of some particularly acute area of ignorance , of which I possess legion, there is never enough time to read all these books , there never will be time enough, there is never enough time in one life to read everything.”
― Richard Gwyn, The Vagabond's Breakfast

“Within the range of Macdonald’s accomplishments, there are sizable gaps. The largest, surely, is that, unlike Lincoln, he never appealed to people’s “better angels.” He was a doer, not a thinker, although highly intelligent and omnivorously well read. He lacked the certitudes of a moralist, instead taking human nature as he found it and turning it to his purposes.”
― Richard Gwyn, John A: The Man Who Made Us

“quarter that has followed his death, his birthdate has been commemorated as January 11, 1815—as in the joyous celebratory dinner staged each year in Kingston, Ontario, for example, and in the inscriptions on all the plaques and statues that honour him. But this particular day may be a mistake. The January 11 date is taken from the entry for his birth made by his father, Hugh Macdonald, in his memorandum book. The entry recorded in the General Register Office in Edinburgh, though, is January 10.*1 Similarly, precision about where specifically Macdonald was born, while a matter of lesser consequence, is as difficult to determine. The delivery may have taken place at 29 Ingram Street in Glasgow or, not far away, at 18 Brunswick Street, both on the south side of the Clyde River, because the family moved between these locations around the time of his birth. To pick at a last unknowable nit, Macdonald’s father recorded the moment of birth as 4:15, without specifying afternoon or early morning.”
― Richard Gwyn, John A: The Man Who Made Us

“Hume decreed that “Liberty is the perfection of society,” but believed equally that “authority must be acknowledged as essential to its [freedom’s] very existence.”
― Richard Gwyn, John A: The Man Who Made Us

“In quite a few ways, we were postmodern before we ever became modern. That was the way we were in John A. Macdonald’s time. In 1884, Goldwin Smith, the leading political commentator of his day, summarized Macdonald’s lifelong mission as “to hold together a set of elements, national, religious, sectional and personal, as motley as the component patches of any ‘crazy quilt,’ and actuated each of them by paramount regard for its own interest.” Here, Smith identified exactly Macdonald’s supreme talent—that he knew how to herd cats. No one else in Canada came close to Macdonald; after him, perhaps only Mackenzie King did, his paramount art being that of doing as little as possible for as long as possible.”
― Richard Gwyn, John A: The Man Who Made Us

“Nor were there many nation-builders like him in his day: Bismarck, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Simón Bolívar. His achievement may have been the more demanding because none of the others had to create a country out of a crazy quilt.”
― Richard Gwyn, John A: The Man Who Made Us

“And although he was in no way the first to use patronage and election funds for partisan purposes—a cherished and well-embedded Canadian tradition (which still thrives)—Macdonald gave the practice credibility and durability by his masterful exercise of it. That’s a shoddy legacy for the father of a country to leave behind.”
― Richard Gwyn, John A: The Man Who Made Us

“.” In The Wealth of Nations, Smith unveiled one of the most liberating of modern ideas—that the interests of the community could be advanced better by the self-interest than by the “benevolence” of the butcher, the baker and all the other upwardly clambering capitalists.”
― Richard Gwyn, John A: The Man Who Made Us

“In fact, Herman never resolves satisfactorily why this achievement should have happened in the particular society of Scotland, so small and backward. The nearest he comes is to argue that, after union with England in 1707, Scottish intellectuals had to cope with the challenge, today common, of “deal[ing] with a dominant culture that one admired but that threatened to overwhelm one’s own heritage and oneself with it.”
― Richard Gwyn, John A: The Man Who Made Us

“The military, moreover, made one major cultural breakthrough: on the frozen lake, members of the Royal Canadian Rifles developed, by hit and miss and bump and grind, a new game using skates, field hockey sticks and a lacrosse ball.”
― Richard Gwyn, John A: The Man Who Made Us