My latest piece in MercatorNet, based on a speech to the Augustine College Summer Conference (and an earlier National Post column and upcoming Dorchester Review article) asks how a society as devoted to "choice" as our own can at the same time so relentlessly restrict choice.
"Looking for fish? Don’t climb a tree."
Chinese proverb (according to "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe and Mail March 31 2011
In my latest National Post column I say, from hearing a series of outstanding talks at Moses Znaimer's ideacity conference, that the future is here now.
"Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful."
Aldous Huxley, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe and Mail July 8, 2004
"In their political arrangements, men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time. With regard to futurity, we are to treat it like a ward. We are not so to attempt an improvement of his fortune as to put the capital of his estate at risk." Edmund Burke An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs
"Hey, I’m not a Pollyanna about the way the world works. Not all the turtles are going to make it to the ocean. That’s not negativism. That’s pragmatism." Dennis Miller The Rants
"Victims can be victims and not be innocent." David Rieff, A Bed for the Night (header quotation on Chapter 2 of Carol Off The Ghosts of Medak Pocket)
"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious." A.N. Whitehead