"I suppose this experience of unemployment was valuable for me. I discovered that it is almost the most debilitating experience a person can have in life, totally sapping one's self-esteem, and plunging one into a maelstrom of depressive thoughts and feelings from which, eventually, one despairs of ever emerging. It certainly gave me a respect for the problems of laid-off workers, so airily dismissed by the media and their consulting economists, during times of what they nowadays call 'economic downturn'. Full employment should be the first social good of any decent government."〔''Memoirs of a Media Maverick'' 2003 Between the Lines, Toronto ISBN 1-896357-80-6〕

"I had also come to some conclusions about my profession. I had a strong distaste for the myths that most journalists seemed to believe about their importance. I had found journalists motivated more by vanity than by a lust for public service, and they tended to be childishly susceptible to flattery from men of power. So far as they believed they were free to write what they wanted, and that they were the first line among defenders of freedom of expression, I thought they were suffering from a massive occupational delusion. I had concluded that freedom lies only with the rich men who own the media, who hire sycophants to do their bidding.

The idea of journalists being better informed than your average citizen is a big part of the myth. A daily newspaper, written by these supposedly super-informed people, gives at best a sketchy view of what is really happening; and that view is fatally deformed by the interests of the media owners, and by the intimate relationship that journalists maintain with men of power. In addition, I knew that journalists do not have the influence they pretend to have. The media at large do have a huge influence in setting the political and social agenda, and they form one of the main barriers to improvements in the quality of human life. But individual workers within the media have limited influence on anything, in my experience. My opinion of the profession I practiced had become, then, slightly anarchistic."〔

Mrs. John Wilson McConnell, known as Lil, is dead. Mrs. McConnell lived for eighty years and did singularly little with them. She spent a lot of money. She had four children, and they had children who had children.
Mrs. McConnell became the friend of the highest in the land. Indeed, she didn't have any friends except Lords, Ladies, Earls, Princes, Dukes, Marquises or millionaires. Mrs. McConnell entertained Royalty. Surrounded by her pompous tapestries, expensive plates, and tasteless furniture, Royalty felt right at home. Mrs. McConnell gave away a lot of her husband's money to Good Causes.
No one, including Mrs. McConnell, knew how much she gave, or quite who she gave it to. Mrs. McConnell did no one any harm, and no discernible good. Let that be her epitaph."