"Now there’s a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!"

Groucho Marx

 "I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence now. He invokes Buddhism and says that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartlepool."

G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy p. 344.

"My usual plan in a new city is to wander, blend in and observe. In Hanoi, I might as well have been 50 lb. of bratwurst trying to blend into a kennel."

Steve Burgess in Maclean’s Feb. 28 2005

In my latest National Post column I say compassionate, intelligent, constructive discussion of Confederate monuments must begin with forthright recognition that they celebrate racial slavery and bigotry.

“Dreadful as it was, I count it a mercy that the climax was reached so quickly.... It was upon us before we realized it. There is no incidental music to the dramas of real life."

Dr. Petrie’s internal monologue in Sax Rohmer The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu 

"to even begin to understand an era, we must visit it on its own terms, and project ourselves into its foreign mind. This is almost impossible to do, which is what makes it such fun. In a sense it means coming home, and finding your home made strange, for the people in the past didn’t think of themselves as living there. Like us, they thought they were living in the present. And then returning to our present, if we have learned anything, we begin to see it as another past."

David Warren in Western Standard December 20, 2004

In my latest National Post column I say departing Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall was a good man but not a great conservative.