“We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities.”
John Winthrop, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things November 2002
“For it is only the love of honour that never grows old; and honour it is, not gain, as some would have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness.”
Thucydides quoting Pericles’ “Funeral Oration” from The Peloponnesian War (an online version; other translations exist, obviously)
“It is quite easy to give people a second nature, if you catch them early enough. There is no belief, however grotesque and even villainous, that cannot be made a part of human nature if it is inculcated in childhood and not contradicted in the child’s hearing.”
George Bernard Shaw Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism (he cites foot-binding, ritual suicide when the king dies and suttee).
“The pain in my soul is unbearable. I keep asking myself the same unsolvable question: If my assault rifle took people’s lives, it means that I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, ... son of a farmer and Orthodox Christian am responsible for people’s deaths. The longer I live, the more often that question gets into my brain, the deeper I go in my thoughts and guesses about why the Almighty allowed humans to have devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression. Everything changes, only a man and his thinking remain unchanged: he’s just as greedy, evil, heartless and restless as before!”
Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47 assault rifle in “a regretful letter” to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, shortly before his death at age 94, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen Jan. 14, 2014 (apparently a spokesman for the Patriarch replied “If the weapon is used to defend the Motherland, the Church supports both its creators and the servicemen using it.”)
In my latest National Post column I say because tyrannies are both ruthless and clueless, the Chinese Communists have no idea how bad they look using the COVID-19 pandemic as cover to crush freedom in Hong Kong.
In my latest Epoch Times column I present the historical apology no Canadian prime minister should ever have to make for a predecessor’s failure to stand up for freedom for the people of Hong Kong.