“peaceful anarchy, than which nothing could be more impossible, given human nature as it is.”
Mortimer J. Adler Ten Philosophical Mistakes
“when we scrape away the varnish of wealth, education, class, ethnic origin, parochial loyalties, we discover that however much we’ve changed the shape of man’s physical environment, man himself is still sinful, vain, greedy, ambitious, lustful, self-centered, unrepentant, and requiring of restraint.”
Barry Goldwater With No Apologies (though elsewhere in the book even he said new technologies and ideas might make the world way better in the 21st century)
In my latest National Post column I quote two ponderously preposterous assurances on the pandemic a year ago to ask why no experience of their own failure ever convinces Canadian authorities to speak more humbly or think more carefully.
In my latest Mercatornet column I say Biden’s hackneyed Inaugural speech may do no harm. But it did not rise to the occasion like, say, Lincoln’s magnificent Second Inaugural and did not even really seem to try.
“Pericles said, twenty-four centuries ago: ‘Come, gentlemen, we sit too long on trifles.’ We do, indeed!”
Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
In my latest National Post column I say Erin O’Toole’s boast about being pragmatic and moderate amounts to saying he has no convictions and cannot be counted on by anyone for anything, and trying to make it sound like an achievement. But it’s not.
In my latest Epoch Times column, I say recent revelations about national security breaches and governmental nonchalance ought to worry Canadians a lot more than they apparently do.
“This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.”
Edmund Burke on French Revolutionaries, quoted in Robert Bork The Tempting of America (and also though slightly less completely in William D. Gairdner Constitutional Crack-Up)