Just now you said: 'Can we not construct or make or create a society?' My answer to that is, no. I don't believe that you do create societies. I believe that this social engineering, in which a group of people—in this case without consulting or being understood, let alone supported, by the mass of their fellow countrymen—say to themselves: 'Let's change this society; let us implant in it something which is profoundly different and alien; then let us see how it goes', is criminal levity.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, April 30, 2026
Criminal Levity
[J.] Enoch Powell (1912-1998), No Easy Answers (London: Sheldon Press, 1973), p. 92 (you = Douglas Brown):