"Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe."
Euripides, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail April 17, 2013.
"The open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth."
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Jim Hurlbert in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004)
"Our new prime minister recently apologized for the Irish famine. I didn’t know he had caused it. And since we know he didn’t, we can only conclude that he accepts the monstrously dangerous, stupid, and incidentally racist concept of inherited racial guilt. This is political correctness run barking mad."
George Macdonald Fraser in National Review January 26, 1998
In my latest National Post column I ask whether the purpose of "uniting the right" in Alberta was to implement conservative policies or to bury them.
"it is characteristic of political philosophers that they take a sombre view of the human situation: they deal in darkness. Human life in their writings appears, generally not as a feast or even as a journey, but as a predicament..."
Michael Oakeshott “Introduction to Leviathan” in Rationalism in politics and other essays
"To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man."
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Andrew Coyne in Maclean’s Jan. 21, 2008
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.