In my latest Epoch Times column I remember, with some difficulty, that even a really annoying and disappointing election is a victory every time we vote freely and without fear.

“He is a modest man, with a great deal to be modest about.”

Winston Churchill about Clement Attlee, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things April 2002

In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the absence of foreign policy and national security from the current election, and from the minds of too many voters throughout the democratic world.

“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.”

Abraham Lincoln, quoted in the American Spectator August 1988

They describe rural New Hampshire churches in March 1968 with spires “pointing the way toward salvation and a God who was, by most current accounts, either dead or hiding out in Argentina. It was going to be a bad year.”

William W. Prochenau & Richard W. Larsen, A Certain Democrat: Senator Henry M. Jackson A Political Biography

“But if ‘every man,’ as it has been written, ‘holds confined within him a mad-man,’ what must every Society do; - Society, which in its commonest state is called ‘the standing miracle of this world’! ‘Without such Earth-rind of Habit,’ continues our Author, ‘call it System of Habits, in a word, fixed ways of acting and believing, - Society would not exist at all.’”

Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution

In my latest National Post column I call Erin O’Toole’s flipflop on gun control a test case of whether populism, as one way of making the electoral system more responsive to popular wishes, actually brings better or more honest policy.

“When you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Winston Churchill, quoted in William D. Gairdner The Trouble With Democracy