“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Riddle of the Ivy” in Tremendous Trifles, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 No. 4 (Jan/Feb. 2000)

“The view that human beings are by nature good and reasonable creatures who can compose their differences peacefully is incompatible with what we know of human behavior in recorded history. It is starkly utopian.... Order can exist without justice and freedom, as we well know, but justice and freedom cannot exist without order.”

Sidney Hook in American Spectator July 1988

In the Epoch Times I argue that Justin Trudeau’s Canada Agenda 2030 isn’t part of some vast shadowy Great Reset plot, just a set of trendy progressive notions whose sweeping cosmic ambitions will succumb to their own vagueness and his chronic managerial incompetence.

In my latest National Post column, I use Fred Litwin’s new book On the Trail of Delusion about Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories to warn of the danger even of the amazingly common garden variety notion that people who disagree with us about public policy must be hiding their real goals.

“Education, even democratic education, will not remove international conflict, because conflict is rooted in the morally ambiguous nature of man.”

Ernest W. Lefever, Ethics And United States Foreign Policy

“There are two levers for moving men; interest and fear."

Widely attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte online but I have not found a specific attribution (mind you, I once worked for someone who said “There are two ways of motivating people – one is fear and I’ve forgotten the other” and the funny thing is, he was a great boss. But I was afraid of incurring his justified displeasure.)

In my latest Loonie Politics column I ask everyone to keep calm and rely on evidence rather than partisan passion in determining whether there were any significant ballot box shenanigans in the United States. It is as absurd to call fraud impossible a priori if you won as to call it necessary a priori if you lost, and the winners have at least as big a stake as the losers in making sure the vote was clean.

“Only the concept of eternity could explain the ambiguity between a loving God and the Holocaust. For if life does not end with the grave, we should pity the prison guard, not his victim.”

Edward F. Halpin who “was at Buchenwald with Patton’s Third Army”, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things March 2001