“We do not read Aristotle to find out what people used to think, but for guidance on the issues of today.”

Here I quote myself, from October 1996.

“You always have to go on that, your instinctive trust or – your lack of trust. In the final analysis, there is really nothing else you can go on.”

Philip K. Dick VALIS

“What if lawyers and economists wrote the sitcoms? Very likely, they would turn out so that they more closely approximated the agony and pain of real life, which is really so frightening that it simply has to be funny.”

An author whose name I did not record in The American Spectator August 1988

Réflexions morales #174 “Il vaut mieux employer notre esprit à supporter les infortunes qui nous arrivent qu’à prévoir celles qui nous peuvent arriver.”

La Rochefoucauld Maximes

“A frightening scene stands out in my memory: three husky Russian policemen, with faces resembling bare buttocks, invading our apartment in search of subversive books.”

Nicolas Slonimsky Perfect Pitch

In my latest National Post column I argue that the solution to toxic anger in politics, far easier said than done, is neither to cause nor succumb to it.

“People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.”

“George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish playwright” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail June 8, 2012

“It is perhaps not altogether a coincidence that the year 1882, in which Darwin died, found Nietzsche proclaiming that ‘God is dead… and we have killed him.’”

Dan Peterson “What’s the Big Deal about Intelligent Design” in The American Spectator December 2005-January 2006