“Liberty, next to religion, has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, 2,460 years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race.”

Start of Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton) The History of Freedom

“History is a vaccine against bad ideas. Unfortunately, current problems arise largely from a recycling of bad ideas from the past.”

Valerius Geist, Wildlife Conservation Policy

In my latest National Post column I say leftist parties are losing traction with the public, often sympathetic to them on other issues, because too much of the left unreflectively treats disloyalty to Western civilization as a virtue.

“The state is not the source of individual rights or of social community. It presupposes that these exist and are worth protecting, and that individuals reciprocally benefit from their interactions with one another…. The state becomes a moral imperative precisely because there is something of value that is worth protecting from the unbridled use of force by those who forsake tradition, family, and friends. A set of forced exchanges from existing rights does not create the original rights so exchanged… A forced exchange does not create culture and sense of community, it protects them by removing the need for compelling or allowing everyone to act as a policeman in his own estate.”

Richard Epstein, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain