“the present era, by and large since the end of the First World War, has returned to the practice and theory of radical hedonism.... We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.”

Erich Fromm To Have and To Be p. xxvii.

“That's what's important, to feel useful in this old world, to hit a lick against what's wrong, or to say a word for what's right even though you get walloped for saying that word. Now I may sound like a Bible beater yelling up a revival at a river crossing camp meeting, but that don't change the truth none. There's right and there's wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you're dead as a beaver hat.”

Davy Crockett (John Wayne) in The Alamo (according to en.wikiquote.org)

“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)