“I fully agree with Leo Tolstoy when he said more or less the following: ‘People say it’s shameful to change one’s convictions. But I say: it’s shameful not to.’”

Vladimir Voinovich The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union

“To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, the miracle of development.”

Winston Churchill explaining why he approved use of the atomic bomb before it had even been successfully tested, quoted by Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [again, sadly, she does not footnote this or any quotation]

“Troops departing from Japan in the heady days of December 1941 were given a booklet to enlighten them as to the nature of their enemies: ‘Westerners – being very superior people, very effeminate and very cowardly – have an intense dislike of fighting in the rain or the mist or at night. Night in particular (although it is excellent for dancing), they cannot conceive to be a proper time for war. In this, if we seize upon it, lies our great opportunity.’”

Quoted by Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [she does not footnote this or any quotation].

In my latest Loonie Politics column I point out that Mark Carney’s slick verbiage is stunningly unreliable, not because he lies on purpose but because his colossal Donald-Trump-like self-regard bends reality for him in real time in very Trumpian fashion.

In my latest National Post column I urge Canada’s federal Conservatives to tackle their electoral and image problems by leaning into them, being the reality party instead of trying to be Liberal lite and having it fail for the umpteenth time.

“Le cardinal de Richelieu a écrit dans ses mémoires qu’un ministre corrompu est moins dangereux pour l’État qu’un ministre incompétent.”

Jacques Dufresne La démocratie athénienne: Miroir de la Notre

In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that NATO meeting in Turkey instead of expelling it indicats a collapse of faith in the Western civilization NATO was created to protect.

“It is in such times that we are haunted by the old maxim, ‘Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make ludicrous.’”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals