"I was honoured – incredibly honoured – to receive an award in [Pierre Berton’s] name. He understood that history is a narrative form, one that can be engaging and vivid. Pierre Berton showed me a Canada that was worthy of passion."

Will Ferguson in a Q&A in The Beaver Oct.-Nov. 2005, re having won the Pierre Berton award for popularizing Canadian history from the National History Society

"As one writer put it in the Wall St. Journal, when cowards ascend to positions of leadership, their character is revealed. They panic in a crisis. They don’t know what to do."

R. Cort Kirkwood in Ottawa Sun Dec. 20, 1998

"Amateurs practice until they can get it right; professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong."

"Anonymous", quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail Dec. 27, 2004

"It will not do to offer democracy, secularism and licentious living as an alternative to religious extremism. The answer to bad religion is good religion — to put it more elegantly, theology is required to answer the false claims of unreasonable religious positions."

Fr. Raymond J. De Souza in National Post January 31, 2008 (after favourably quoting George Weigel's claim that "It is thus a great folly to think that jihadism and the terrorism it underwrites can be understood in terms drawn primarily from the patois of the therapeutic society, as if jihadist terrorism were some Levantine form of psychiatric aberration. Within their own theological frame of reference and the reading of history it warrants, jihadists are not crazy. They make, to themselves, a terrible kind of sense.")

"a hurricane in a pawnshop"

Tom Carson (specifically re Jane Fonda's life, reviewing Fonda's My Life So Far) in The Atlantic Monthly July-August 2005

In my latest National Post column I say government regulation of Facebook would actually make a bad situation worse, that it's censorship, and that self-control beats state control.

"A fish stinks first from the head."

Adage about leadership, widely quoted and attributed.