"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other."
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (quoted on https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/679-war-is-an-ugly-thing-but-not-the-ugliest-of)
"I allow that, if no Supreme Ruler exists, wise to form and potent to enforce the moral law, there is no sanction to any contract, virtual or even actual, against the will of prevalent power. On that hypothesis let any set of men be strong enough to set their duties at defiance, and they cease to be duties any longer.”
Edmund Burke An Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs
"history is above all concrete and particular, not general and abstract…. the thoughts and deeds of once living beings.”
Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence
"The past is hopeless. There’s too much of it."
Detective Nero Wolfe in Home to Roost, quoted in “Gilbert’s Top Dozen Pearls of Detective Wisdom” in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 # 3 (December 2001)
In my latest National Post column I provide Canada's Prime Minister with the independent inquiry he demanded into Israel's use of force to protect its borders against Hamas terrorism.
“Although an enormous diversity of opinion was behind bars in the Gulag... all the dissidents understood that a society that does not protect the right of dissent, even if the society perfectly conforms to their own unique values and ideas, will inevitably turn into a fear society that endangers everybody.... A simple way to determine whether the right to dissent in a particular society is being upheld is to apply the town square test: Can a person walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm? If he can, then that person is living in a free society. If not, it’s a fear society.”
Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy
"Religion alone makes the righting of wrongs seem urgent without magnifying them to fill the whole universe, alone allows of humility without subservience, determination without arrogance, and contentment without inertia. It is, in fact, the only alternative to Totalitarianism, which explains why religion and the Totalitarian State are always at war with one another."
Malcolm Muggeridge in "Time and Tide" (1937) in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge