In my latest piece in C2C Journal I say that while "legislating morality" has a distinctly Victorian and reactionary feel we actually do it all the time, often on "progressive" grounds, so we need to think clearly about why and how we do it.

"But even regarding History as the butcher's block at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised — the question involuntarily arises — to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered."

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History
 

“The main thing is never to act against your conscience, not to put your signature on documents you do not believe in, not to vote for those who you think should not be elected, not to approve decisions, not to applaud, not to pass on lies, not to broadcast them, not to write them, not to put them down on paper, not to pretend … Let your creed be 'Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph, but not through me.'"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn "Live not by the Lie" quoted by Ian Hunter in National Post August 5, 2008

"the further back you look, the further ahead in the future you can see."

Winston Churchill, quoted by Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon in Cato Policy Analysis #364 (Dec. 15, 1999) 

"We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile."

Hilaire Belloc, quoted in “The Catholic Buckley” in George William Rutler He Spoke to Us, saying they were "written after gazing upon the ruins of Timgad in North Africa, a city destroyed by the Vandals” 

"It is only by believing in God that we can ever criticize the Government. Once abolish God, and the Government becomes the God. That fact is written all across human history."

G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 #5 (March 2002)

In my latest Looniepolitics column I defend Bob Plamondon's disquieting claim that it was Jean Chrétien.