My latest piece in MercatorNet, based on a speech to the Augustine College Summer Conference (and an earlier National Post column and upcoming Dorchester Review article) asks how a society as devoted to "choice" as our own can at the same time so relentlessly restrict choice.
"America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand."
Harry S. Truman (displayed on the hoarding around a construction site in Philadelphia Sept. 12 2016
"Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out."
Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, quoted by Jeff Hayden on www.inc.com
“Goodness me! Humans don't go to heaven! No, someone made that up to prevent you all from going nuts!”
Kryten the robot butler in the Red Dwarf episode "Last Day" (as a side note, Kryten firmly believes in a "silicon heaven" for everything from robots to calculators to toasters)
"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