“Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.”

D.P. Diffiné, “Wal-Mart Open for Business: A 30th Anniversary Salute to Wal-Mart” (1992)

"To grant that there is a supreme intelligence who rules the world and has established laws to regulate the actions of his creatures; and still to assert that man, in a state of nature, may be considered as perfectly free from all restraints of law and government, appears to a common understanding altogether irreconcilable. Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the deity, from the relations we stand in to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever. This is what is called the law of nature....Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind."

Alexander Hamilton, "Founders' Quote Daily" November 23, 2005 from Federalist.com.

"Well, we've said it many times — if a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a handgun."

“Rather’s Familiar Quotations” (from CBS's Dan Rather) in The Atlantic Monthly March 2005

“At that moment, and only for that moment, everything fitted into place. Every tendency in himself, in societies; the past and the future; all he had ever seen or thought or felt or believed, sorted itself out. It was a vision of Good and Evil. Heaven and Hell. Life and death. There were two alternatives; and he had to choose. He chose.”

Malcolm Muggeridge "Winter in Moscow" (1934), in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge.

Mark Sutcliffe spoke with me on his "Ottawa Today" show about my National Post column on Trudeau mishandling the admittedly very difficult U.S. President.

“Some of this history is very interesting, but the motive behind it is not historical. It was Columbus, and not his chambermaid, who sailed to discover America; Napoleon, and not his math teacher, who crushed Europe under his heel.”

William Gairdner, The Trouble with Democracy

“We have radios which can bring to everybody the best in music and literature. What we hear instead is, to a large extent, trash at the pulp magazine level or advertising which is an insult to intelligence and taste. We have the most wonderful instruments and means man has ever had, but we do not stop and ask what they are for.”

Erich Fromm Man for Himself (written in 1947)