“in the seventeenth century, when men were just what they are now, except that they had no telephones nor airplanes.”

George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism

“Who is the most read historian of the ancient world? the learned professor asks his class. Tacitus perhaps? Suetonius? Herodotus? All wrong, he’s afraid. The most read and probably most reliable recorder of ancient history was a man known as Luke, the probable author of the Third Gospel of the New Testament and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles.”

Christian History Project, The Veil is Torn

In my latest National Post column I say it’s high time a parliamentary committee looked into China’s repression and aggression… and our government’s odd blindness to it.

“Kind of a shame kids have to grow up into people.”

Davy Crockett (played by John Wayne) in The Alamo

"Montesquieu seems, in fact, to have looked on the nature of man as entirely plastic, as passively reproducing the impressions, and submitting implicitly to the impulses, which it receives from without. And here no doubt lies the error which vitiates his system as a system. He greatly underrates the stability of human nature.... those qualities which each generation receives from its predecessors, and transmits but slightly altered to the generation which follows it."

Henry Sumner Maine Ancient Law (re L’Esprit des Lois)

In my latest National Post column I say Britain needs a Tory victory because (a) Corbyn is a loathsome anti-Semite (b) democracy requires you to respect referendum results and (c) self-government requires a functioning parliament, which the UK hasn’t had since 2016.

“What I have applied to language, is still more justly applicable to sentiments and manners. The passions, the sources from which these must spring in all their modifications, are generally the same in all ranks and conditions, all countries and ages; and it follows, as a matter of course, that the opinions, habits of thinking, and actions, however influenced by the peculiar state of society, must still, upon the whole, bear a strong resemblance to each other.”

Dedicatory Epistle to Sir Walter Scott Ivanhoe