"Questionless, there is no perfecter endowment in man than political virtue, and of this Economics is commonly esteemed not the least part…"
Plutarch’s Lives Vol. I p. 481.
In my latest National Post column I find some comfort in Hungary repatriating Roman-era silver.
"It is one of the deep jokes of existence that very wise people and very ignorant people frequently say the same thing; perhaps it is the basis of democracy."
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Feb. 23, 1907, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #1 (September 2006)
"It is an unfortunate habit of publicly repenting for other people’s sins."
G.K. Chesterton, “The Midnight of Europe,” in The Crimes of England, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #2 (October-November 2003)
"'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked. 'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'"
Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (frequently misquoted or misattributed including to Mark Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald according to www.sovereignman.com/offshore/slowly-at-first-then-all-at-once-12909, which warned that it applies to nations too)
In my latest National Post column I lament that the Speaker of the BC legislature seems to have become just one more partisan tool for control of the executive branch instead of a bulwark of legislative independence in defence of self-government.
My latest piece in MercatorNet, based on a speech to the Augustine College Summer Conference (and an earlier National Post column and upcoming Dorchester Review article) asks how a society as devoted to "choice" as our own can at the same time so relentlessly restrict choice.