In The Interim I reflect on classic books on the vital topic of citizenship only to realize I can’t think of any.
“Give your brain as much attention as you do your hair and you'll be a thousand times better off.”
Malcolm X (widely quoted online; I was first alerted to it in a paraphrase in the Ottawa Citizen March 7, 1999)
“I hate a man who swallows [food], affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters.”
Charles Lamb, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail December 20, 2002
In my latest National Post column I say classes where students of one race only are taught material by authors of once race only by teachers of one race only is still segregation and still wrong practically and morally.
“an old family friend … a retired auto-shop teacher, the sort of guy who knows about wrenches, who even has views on wrenches.”
Kevin Bolger in Ottawa Citizen March 12, 1999
“during the International Year of Peace in 1986, a global commission of experts concluded that war was unnatural and humans themselves unwarlike! Unfortunately, innocent people get killed because of that kind of thinking. Many, especially in our universities, now are convinced that war always results from real, rather than perceived, grievances…”
Mackenzie Institute Newsletter April 2002
In my latest National Post column I say the unsuccessful experience with online learning during the pandemic is yet another argument for adopting a choice-driven, voucher/charter school educational system.
“’People say to me, that it is but a dream to suppose that Christianity should regain the organic power in human society which once it possessed. I cannot help that; I never said it could. I am not a politician; I am proposing no measures, but exposing a fallacy, and resisting a pretence. Let Benthamism reign, if men have no aspirations; but do not tell them to be romantic, and then solace them with glory; do not attempt by philosophy what was once done by religion. The ascendancy of Faith may be impracticable, but the reign of Knowledge is incomprehensible.’”
John Henry Newman, “The Tamworth Reading Room” (1841) quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind