"an open mind, to be sure, should be open at both ends, like the foodpipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake."

Northrop Frye The Great Code

In the modern view "With the Enlightenment… World history was finally brought to its climax, its real new beginning, not in Jerusalem but in Western Europe and America, not in the first century but in the eighteenth. (We may perhaps be allowed a wry smile at the way in which post-Enlightenment thinkers to this day heap scorn upon the apparently ridiculous idea that world history reached its climax in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, while themselves holding a view we already know to be at least equally ridiculous.)"

N.T. Wright The Challenge of Jesus

In my latest National Post column I say it's past time people stopped being shocked and stunned at populist upsets over smug insiders and started learning useful lessons about offering real choice.

In my latest Looniepolitics column I commend the Ontario Tories for having a good leadership race, while asking whether they also have conservative policies.

"It is no more admirable to have valuable suggestions to make and not put them into circulation than it is to have a valuable coin of the realm and keep it stuffed into a greasy old stocking."

G.K. Chesterton, “The Walking Paradox,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton

"You say you want man to be to himself what God has been to man. But what God has been to man is man’s absolute superior, and man cannot be his own superior…. So when you say you want man to be to himself what God has been to man hitherto, you mean you want some men to be to other men what God has been to man. You want some men to be the absolute superiors of others. I assume that you want to be in the former group and not in the latter."

J. Budziszewski in What We Can’t Not Know [part of his Platonic dialogue with a skeptic].

In my latest National Post column I say the Prime Minister's insistence on the Newspeak term "peoplekind" was neither a joke nor innocent.