“No society can be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.”

Adam Smith, quoted in Lionel Robbins The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy

“Once abolish God, and the government becomes the God.”

G.K. Chesterton in “Christendom in Dublin” quoted by Noah Morey in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #1 (September 2004)

“the Roman empire is afflicted rather than changed – a thing which has befallen it in other times also, before the name of Christ was heard, and it has been restored after such affliction – a thing which even in these times is not to be despaired of.”

Augustine City of God

In my latest National Post column I say Remembrance Day is not a pacifist occasion, even on the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War. (On which, and on the meaning and impact of World War I generally, see again The Great War Remembered on YouTube or in my online store.)

“Economic systems come and go like fashions in surgery and in the clothes of women, and during the nineteenth century the Mercantile System was discarded in favour of a system of free and open competition. At least, so I have been told.”

Hendrick Van Loon The Story of Mankind

“Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, ‘I will not hit you if you do not hit me’; there is no trace of such a transaction. There is a trace of both men having said, ‘We must not hit each other in the holy place.’”

G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy