“When Benjamin Franklin was seven years old... he fell in love with a whistle. He was so excited about it that he went into the toy shop, piled all his coppers on the counter, and demanded the whistle without even asking its price. ‘I then came home,’ he wrote to a friend 70 years later, ‘and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle.’ When his older brothers and sisters found out that he had paid far more for his whistle than he should have paid, they gave him the horse laugh; and, as he said: ‘I cried with vexation.’... But the lesson taught Franklin was cheap in the end. ‘As I grew up,’ he said, ‘and came into the world and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for the whistle.’”

Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“The Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God’s command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law.”

Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism

On the Crown & Crozier podcast I discuss Magna Carta, church, state and you.

“during the International Year of Peace in 1986, a global commission of experts concluded that war was unnatural and humans themselves unwarlike! Unfortunately, innocent people get killed because of that kind of thinking. Many, especially in our universities, now are convinced that war always results from real, rather than perceived, grievances…”

Mackenzie Institute Newsletter April 2002

In my latest National Post column I say the unsuccessful experience with online learning during the pandemic is yet another argument for adopting a choice-driven, voucher/charter school educational system.

An “indignity [that] would incite a stone to be revenged.”

Samuel Pepys in his Diary Nov. 22 1666, about a supposed insult by Louis XIV of France to Charles II of England, specifically dressing all his footmen in a garment Charles favoured as the height of fashion.

“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.”

G.K. Chesterton What I Saw In America

In my latest National Post column I say “This government doesn’t do hard” could become our new national motto as a vast cast of characters across the executive, legislative and judicial branches avoids thinking about difficult choices from COVID to national security and the budget.