"No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it."

Theodore Roosevelt (when he was New York City Police Commissioner)

In its annual report Freedom House had rated 81 of the world’s countries as providing a high degree of individual liberty. "It is not an accident that a majority of the citizens in 74 of those countries are Christians."

Paul Marshall, a Canadian political scientist and senior fellow with the Centre for Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C., quoted in British Columbia Report April 5, 1999

In a Financial Post column today I say the Supreme Court's ruling in the "case of beer" a.k.a. R. v. Comeau is not only ill-timed and legally illogical, it's post-truth.

"The most primitive idols, even those which have long been abandoned to the jungle and the sand-drift, are land-marks in the journey of the human soul: they represent a search for coherence in the confusions and fears of living. So this venerable House of Lords was not simply a constitutional relic of the great landed fortunes; it was also a fetish, it meant the ideally paternal responsibility of the noble few. And though this meaning was quite irrelevant to the twentieth century, yet those who tried to preserve it were not merely idle men or arrogant men. They saw the passing of certain values which at their best were very high and at their worst were very human; they did not realize that life consists in change, that nothing can stand still, that today’s shrines are only fit for tomorrow’s cattle."

George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England

"We must understand the difference between fear societies and free societies, between dictators and democrats. We must understand the link between democracy and peace and between human rights and security. Above all, we must bring back moral clarity so that we may draw on the power of free individuals, free nations, and the free world for the enormous challenges ahead."

Natan Sharansky’s “Preface” in Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy

"The important borders during the Cold War were seen as those that separated capitalists from communists, Americans from Soviets, East from West. But not to dissidents. Of course, more than anyone else, we were painfully aware of these fault lines because we often paid the price for crossing them… Still, while the fault lines framed the larger geopolitical and ideological contours of the superpower face-off, they failed to capture what for many of us was an even more important threshold – a border that did not separate the world as it was, but rather as it might be. On one side stood those who were prepared to confront evil. On the other stood those who were prepared to appease it."

Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer, The Case for Democracy