“Now in the case of water, by splashing it one can make it shoot up higher than one’s forehead, and by forcing it one can make it stay on a hill. How can that be the nature of water? It is the circumstances being what they are. That man can be made bad shows that his nature is no different from that of water in this respect.”
Mencius in a collection of his writings titled simply Mencius
“no rational creature can be supposed to change his condition with an intention to be worse”
John Locke The Second Treatise of Government
“human beings, that is... psychotic apes who want to kill so much that they could not even understand an unconditional prohibition against killing, much less obey it.”
Northrop Frye The Great Code
“‘The idea that going to the beach was good for you was a creation of 18th-century Britain,’ writes Charles Leadbeater in Prospect magazine. ‘Entrepreneurs keen to promote an alternative to the spa hit upon the idea that immersing people in cold salty water might be healthy. One of the first recorded bathing expeditions took to the North Sea at Scarborough in 1627. A century later, a string of seaside alternatives to the spas at Bath and Buxton were well established. Before that, beaches had been regarded as hostile places, at best a working space for people who made their living from the sea: fishermen, smugglers, wreckers. Swimming for pleasure, and sunbathing, were unheard of.’”
“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail September 15, 2004
“I argue for a sober view of man and his institutions that would permit reasonable things to be accomplished, foolish things abandoned, and utopian things forgotten. A sober view of man requires a modest definition of progress.”
James Q. Wilson Thinking About Crime
In my latest National Post column I ask how we can be at yet another crucial “make or break” tipping point in the pandemic, and what exactly happens if we “make” it or fail to this time… and the next… and the next…
In my latest Epoch Times column I remind Prime Minister Trudeau, just in case he has forgotten, that money is not wealth and that in handing out the former it is important not to lose sight of creating the latter.