"As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight."

Thomas Paine in Common Sense, quoted in the "Founder’s Quote Daily" from The Patriot Post July 16, 2010

In my latest National Post column I ridicule McMaster University's policy of banning all smoking on campus, of anything, any way, as infantilizing and unscientific, two odd qualities for an institution of higher learning.

"What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?"
Thomas Sowell in Is Reality Optional?

"If you subsidize a thing, you’re going to get it."

Dinesh D’Souza in Chronicles magazine September 1991.

"I can listen patiently to a Communist repeating for hours at a time that Property is unnecessary, because men must surrender selfish interests to social ideals. I only begin to break the furniture when somebody starts to prove that Property is necessary, because men are all selfish and every man must look after himself. The case for Property is not that a man must look after himself; but, on the contrary, that a normal man has to look after other people, if it be simply a wife and family. It is that this unit should have an economic basis for its social independence. If he were considering only himself, he might be more independent as a vagabond; he might be more secure as a serf. But the point at the moment is that I like Property because it is a noble thing. I can respect the revolutionist who dislikes it because it is an ignoble thing. But I have no truck with the cynic who likes it because it is ignoble."

G.K. Chesterton in "The New Dark Ages" in G.K.’s Weekly May 21 1927, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 # 8, Issue 73 (July-August 2006) p. 9.

In my latest National Post column I say tax reform would be easier to discuss and accomplish if governments weren't universally desperate for money. So arguably politicians and voters should give more thought to why they are.

"The first impression that one gets of a ruler and of his brains is from seeing the men that he has about him."

Machiavelli, quoted in Dan Rather The Palace Guard

"Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his 1983 Templeton Address re the disastrous history of Russia in the 20th century, quoted in Philip Yancey Soul Survivor