“You do not always get to choose your enemies. Sometimes your enemies choose you. Recall: This is the ancient story. The peace and freedom, the religious and cultural and scientific creativity of a high civilization, depend finally on the will to maintain order, to vindicate the right, to stop the criminal and insurgent. There is no neutral ground between civilization and barbarism. There is not even a boundary. You are either going up, or you are coming down.” David Warren in Ottawa Citizen March 8 2006

“Mr. [Andrei] Sakharov often said that in today’s world, a moral decision is the most pragmatic decision.” Andrei Piontkovsky in Globe and Mail June 4 2001

“The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future. What is there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage - who can tell? - but truth - truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder - the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as those on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff - with his own inborn strength. Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags - rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No: you want a deliberate belief.” Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness

“The smoke may be coming out right here, but the fire is obviously somewhere else. No good throwing water on the smoke.” William Gairdner The Trouble with Democracy

“All of humanity's problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Once you laugh at a thing, it becomes sacred forever.” G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Frances Farrell in Gilbert! Vol. 4 #8 (July/August 2001)

“And isn’t this obvious, that people derive most of their benefits from knowing themselves, and most of their misfortunes from being self-deceived?” Socrates in Xenophon Conversations of Socrates

“the core Western conviction about history – that the human story was not just one damn thing after another – was deeply influenced by Christian doctrine.” George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral