“doctors joke about a test for insanity: Put someone in a room with an overflowing sink and a mop. And then see if he tries to mop up the mess - or just turns off the tap.”

Peter Brimelow in National Review April 7, 1997

In my latest National Post column I say leftist parties are losing traction with the public, often sympathetic to them on other issues, because too much of the left unreflectively treats disloyalty to Western civilization as a virtue.

“Nobody worries, within the ‘hard’ sciences, about the morality of molecules. Even quarks, whatever their assigned properties of color, flavor, and charm, have yet to be regarded as good or evil. But no work of history of which I’m aware has ever been written without making some kind of statement – explicitly or implicitly, consciously or subconsciously – about where its subjects lie along the ubiquitous spectrum that separates the admirable from the abhorrent. You can’t escape thinking about history in moral terms…. The reason is that we are, unlike all others, moral animals…. even Hitler knew that the Holocaust was immoral, or he wouldn’t have gone to the efforts he did to try to conceal it. To try to purge human nature of a moral sense is to deny what distinguishes it. You’d be writing the histories of schools of fish, flocks of birds, and herds of deer, not people. The issue for historians, then, is not whether we should make moral judgements, but how we can do so responsibly…”

John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History

“Economics is really about understanding the world – and changing it – and not in a messianic fashion, but in an honest fashion.”

James J. Heckman, co-winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Economics, quoted in Ottawa Citizen Oct. 12, 2000

“It ain’t what a man don’t know as makes him a fool, but what he does know that ain’t so.”

The “homely wisdom of Josh Billings (1818-1885)” quoted in Daniel Boorstin Cleopatra’s Nose