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.
“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 my latest National Post column I express the desire that Erin O’Toole base policy on principles and explain it in terms of them.
“’I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done, as long as I enjoyed it at the time,’ she [Katharine Hepburn] once said. That really is not a sound thought, and not even worldly…. If he enjoyed the rape, he should feel no regret for having done it?”
William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review August 11, 2003
“‘In any look toward 2050, you have the problem of trying to calculate how many babies those who are currently unborn are going to be having. You can’t do that.’”
Nicholas Eberstadt, quoted in “The Population Dud,” The Catholic World Report, May, 2002 according to Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 5 #8 (July/August 2002)
“It is quite easy to give people a second nature, if you catch them early enough. There is no belief, however grotesque and even villainous, that cannot be made a part of human nature if it is inculcated in childhood and not contradicted in the child’s hearing.”
George Bernard Shaw Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism (he cites foot-binding, ritual suicide when the king dies and suttee).
“The past is irrevocable, but many of the factors behind its tragedies are still at work in the present, and are a danger to the future. The issues change – eugenics is not environmentalism – but the dogmatism and the ego behind the dogmatism are the same.”
Thomas Sowell Is Reality Optional?