"'Don’t you swelter all day in the sun?’ Epictetus asked rhetorically [comparing watching the logistically nightmarish ancient Olympic games to life generally]. 'Aren’t you jammed in with the crowds? Isn’t it hard to get a bath? Aren’t you soaked to the bone whenever it rains? Don’t the din and the shouting and the petty annoyances drive you completely mad? But of course you put up with it all because it’s an unforgettable spectacle.'"

Tony Perrottet, author of The Naked Olympics, in Ottawa Citizen July 17, 2004

In my latest National Post column I say the Prime Minister's insistence on the Newspeak term "peoplekind" was neither a joke nor innocent.

Yesterday Danielle Smith interviewed me on her 770 CHQR radio show about the upcoming EEA conference in Calgary "Stemming the Tide of Red Ink" (March 2-3). We've got a great lineup of speakers from business, government and academia to talk about what's wrong federally, provincially and at the often-neglected municipal level and, crucially, about what we can do to fix it and we hope to see you there.

In some sense the French Revolution was “the black desperate battle of Men against their whole Condition and Environment, - a battle, alas, withal, against the Sin and Darkness that was in themselves as in others: this is the Reign of Terror."

Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution

"If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin."

T.S. Eliot "The Idea of a Christian Society" quoted in Russell Kirk The Politics of Prudence 

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