"Canada is free and freedom is its nationality"
Sir Wilfrid Laurier, quoted in Brian Lee Crowley Fearful Symmetry
In my latest National Post column I caution aboriginal militants against putting forward apparently insatiable demands in an insensitive, arrogant tone.
“It is natural to civilised man to go back upon his past, and to be grateful for all profit he can gain from the study of his own development. So we may be certain that the claim of Greece and Rome to our eternal gratitude will never cease to be asserted, and their right to teach us still what we could have learnt nowhere else will never be successfully disputed.”
W. Warde Fowler Rome (written November 1911)
“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it."
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in Cormac McCarthy No Country for Old Men
“Once, long ago, a little crazy hypothesis was thrown across a dark sky and left there. And people could never forget it. Religions were built by its light, poets’ minds shone in its brightness, political systems used its warmth to draw men closer together, and science examined it cautiously and ‘proved’ it to be the essence of sanity, the seed of human growth. It may be only a bedtime story that men told themselves in their loneliness; it may be a lie: this sanctity of the human being, this importance of man the individual, this right of the child to grow, but when it is proved so, there will no longer be an earth to witness the lie’s triumph and no men here to mourn the loss of their dream.”
Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream
In my latest National Post column, I point to a Page One story in Monday's paper about children with three genetic parents to underline my warning, in the print edition that same day, that scenarios we thought we might wrestle with ethically in the future are here now. Yet we seem unready to wrestle, even unable to.
"The consciousness of genius is bad for people."
Virginia Woolf in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, re Robert Graves, quoted in Raleigh Trevelyan’s Introduction to Robert Graves Goodbye to All That
In my latest National Post column I say, from hearing a series of outstanding talks at Moses Znaimer's ideacity conference, that the future is here now.