In my latest National Post column I say the search for life in space is boooring because only life with photosynthesis is interesting and even if we find it, which seems highly unlikely, it won’t solve any of our moral or even technological problems here on Earth.
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask Erin O’Toole to consider just how far Canada has moved left politically and indeed culturally and intellectually in recent years, and whether he thinks this massive swing is good, bad or mixed, before deciding what he’d like to do about it.
“The problem with introspection is that it has no end; like Bottom’s dream in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it has no bottom.”
Philip K. Dick The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
“You can be quick but not in a hurry.”
John Wooten, quoted on ESPN January 28, 1989
“If all decorum, discipline, and subordination are to be destroyed, and universal Pyrrhonism, anarchy, and insecurity of property are to be introduced, nations will soon wish their books in ashes, seek for darkness and ignorance, superstition and fanaticism, as blessings, and follow the standard of the first mad despot, who, with the enthusiasm of another Mahomet, will endeavor to obtain them.”
John Adams, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind
“In opposition to his enervated gang of outcast wrecks you are able to marshal the flower and strength of all Italy.”
Cicero Selected Political Speeches [referring on the one hand to Catalina and on the other to the people of Rome]
“As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forest and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries…. Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails.”
Michael Oakeshott “The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind” in Rationalism in politics and other essays
In my latest National Post column I say people who want a government strategy for every problem lack faith in the creativity and decency of human beings especially including Canadians.