"Only through scrutiny of the past can society descry the limitations of human nature.”
Russel Kirk The Conservative Mind
“in all their actions all men do in fact aim at what they think good.”
Aristotle The Politics
In my latest National Post column I ponder the mystery of Donald Trump's enduring appeal to people who should know better... and those who drive them to it.
In my latest National Post column I ask whether the purpose of "uniting the right" in Alberta was to implement conservative policies or to bury them.
"it is characteristic of political philosophers that they take a sombre view of the human situation: they deal in darkness. Human life in their writings appears, generally not as a feast or even as a journey, but as a predicament..."
Michael Oakeshott “Introduction to Leviathan” in Rationalism in politics and other essays
"To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."
Confucius, anticipating Donald Rumsfeld, quoted in Henry David Thoreau Walden (Project Gutenberg edition)