"Our magazine’s habit of pointing this out [that the elite’s myths about Canada are not actually true], and of stubbornly remembering times when things made more sense, causes our critics to say we’re stuck in the past. I can only reply that they are stuck in the present – in most respects a singularly dismal and confining place to be. It’s like having cultural Alzheimer’s."

Link Byfield in Globe & Mail October 25, 1999

In my latest National Post column I say French President Emmanuel Macron's expressed wish to govern like Jupiter would have doomed him in the English-speaking world... and should have in France or anywhere else too.

"When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you."

Irving Layton, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Globe & Mail August 8, 2001

"Odd, I thought to myself, how in all walks of life there are lives graced by dreams, and lives steeped in dullness. And when greatness strikes, the dreamer is prepared; grace softens the shock. But to the dull, greatness can be traumatic."

Frank Capra The Name Above the Title

"I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge?"

The heroine in J.D. Salinger Franny and Zooey, quoted by Edward Tingley in First Things January 2002

"One science only will one genius fit/ So vast is art, so narrow human wit."

Alexander Pope, quoted in Marshall McLuhan The Gutenberg Galaxy