“There is no law of geography which dictates that it would be impossible for all the inhabitable areas of the earth to lie in latitudes, and be subject to physical conditions, of the type that produced the Asian empires…. Indeed, how can any ‘rigorous’ theory account for Britain’s being an island, a fact that has certainly contributed most importantly to the world’s social and political development. Its insulation was the merest accident on any rational time scale, dating from some ten thousand years ago, a geological instant.”

Robert Conquest in Reflections on a Ravaged Century, critiquing the narrowness of Marx’s development theory.

“Paul Samuelson, winner of the second Nobel Prize in Economics, is fond of saying that economists have successfully forecast seven of the last four recessions.”

William Watson in Globalization and the Meaning of Canadian Life

“It was my survival instinct and force of character which saved me. I never panicked, became stressed or cried. I was even singing. I went there after a little bout of depression but when I found myself suddenly trapped and in a survival situation, everything changed.”

A man found alive after five weeks trapped in underground caves in southwestern France, who survived by eating rotten wood and clay, quoted in Globe & Mail January 24, 2005.

‘‘My very dear sons, it is better never to undertake any high enterprise than to abandon it when once begun….’”

Pope Gregory, in reply to an appeal from St. Augustine of Canterbury and others to be excused from attempting to evangelize the English nation because “they were appalled at the idea of going to a barbarous, fierce, and pagan nation, of whose very language they were ignorant”, quoted in Bede A History of the English Church and People

“Re the notion that we don’t need democracy because God gave us shari’a, approving of democracy despite everything means respecting humans sufficiently to respect even their errors, as well as recognizing that your own are likely to be no less serious for being less evident to you.”

Another of mine, from December 20, 2001

“Look, I love [his] work. But have you seen the man trying to communicate without a script? He’s about as articulate as a bag of potato chips. Warren Beatty couldn’t win a debate with a mime.”

Richard Roper in the Chicago Sun-Times regarding a potential Beatty presidential run quoted in Globe & Mail September 7, 1999

“He offers a remarkable tribute to the almost forgotten truth that man is never genuinely at home except in goodness, that artistic emotions can no more refresh the nature than a liqueur can quench the thirst.’”

G.K. Chesterton (on Aleister Crowley, whose doctrines he loathed and the one person he refused to debate, but with regard to his book The Soul of Osiris), quoted by Chris Chan in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)

“there is little reason to believe that this socialism [that he saw coming in Britain and the U.S.] will mean the advent of the civilization of which orthodox socialists dream. It is much more likely to present fascist features. That would be a strange answer to Marx’s prayer. But history sometimes indulges in jokes of questionable taste.”

Joseph Schumpeter Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy