"The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell."
Zora Hurston, quoted in Elie Nasrallah Hostage to History
"No matter how bad things are, you have to remember, either you get killed or you don’t. The rest is just psychology."
His father on living through the Blitz, quoted by David Warren in Ottawa Citizen October 21, 2001
In my latest National Post column I see worrying parallels between the federal Liberals and King James II on raising revenue without real Parliamentary consent.
"Six centuries is not such a very long time in the history of the world…" Hugh Braun The English Castle
"In their political arrangements, men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time. With regard to futurity, we are to treat it like a ward. We are not so to attempt an improvement of his fortune as to put the capital of his estate at risk." Edmund Burke An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs
Lincoln County in the New Mexico Territory, in its Wild West days, was the kind of place "where a man would kill you just to see if a gun worked." TV documentary on the "Lincoln County War" famously involving Billy the Kid that aired in Ottawa on December 18, 1998 (as a pedantic rule I try to source my quotations as accurately as possible but sometimes all you get is all I scribbled down at the time)