“Vaguely in the course of time (and more especially in our Protestant countries) the Reformation has come to stand for the idea of ‘liberty of thought.’ Martin Luther is represented as the vanguard of progress. But when history is something more than a series of flattering speeches addressed to our own glorious ancestors, when to use the words of the German historian Ranke, we try to discover what ‘actually happened,’ then much of the past is seen in a very different light. Few things in human life are either entirely good or entirely bad. Few things are either black or white.”

Hendrik Van Loon The Story of Mankind

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the arrogance behind the Prime Minister’s sneering refusal to admit he’s the one who stayed in that $6k/night London hotel suite is a major problem in Canadian public affairs.

“The kid, meantime, is frozen, like a rabbit frozen by the eyebeams of a cougar. He knows it is time to split, but he can’t move. He is stricken stiff and fascinated by his own impending destruction.”

Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (regarding a hapless young man being tormented by a Hells Angel)

“When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

Jonathan Swift, as “Quote of the Week” in Watt’s Up With That “Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #488” January 24, 2022

In this mid-October Loonie Politics column (which I apparently forgot to post at the time, sorry) I argue that the huge list of caucus critics unveiled by Pierre Poilievre is absurd in an ominous way, reflecting and contributing to the absorption of the legislature by the executive.

“One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.”

Will Durant, quoted in Globe & Mail June 2, 1999

“One of the most popular supposed short cuts is imagining that we can make our decisions easier by bypassing value judgments and assigning numbers to everything. Call this the numerical fallacy, or the fallacy of false precision. I’m not saying that it’s never useful to count things.... if a lot of people are out of work, I want some idea of how many, and if prices are going up, I want some idea of how much. The problem is that we rely on numbers too much, too carelessly, for too many things, and we trust them far more than we should. Excessive trust in numbers is part of the technocratic ideology which supposes that government by experts is not political.... There just isn’t a way of generating measurements that isn’t based on value judgments. The only question is which value judgments it depends on, and how transparently or obscurely it depends on them.... Fortunately, there is an instrument for making judgments: The human mind. And there is a way to calibrate it: Experience, deliberation, debate, and the cultivation of practical wisdom. Sorry, but there aren’t any short cuts.”

J. Budziszewski “Underground Thomist” Dec. 27, 2021 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/the-technocratic-fallacy-of-false-precision].

“I guess the classic loser buck-me-up which John Diefenbaker used on every losing occasion is a quote from Sir Andrew Barton, an Elizabethan soldier: ‘…I am wounded but I am not slaine, I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile and then I’ll rise and fight againe.’ And he did.”

End of Val Sears column on the pain of political defeat in Ottawa Sun June 29, 2004