In my latest Epoch Times column I say Patrick Brown’s claim to be a “pragmatic” conservative actually means voters have no idea what he would do if elected and neither does he… like an amazingly long line of political figure prone to boasting of their mental and moral hollowness..
“You have not come back from hell with empty hands.”
A handwritten note from André Malraux to Whittaker Chambers about his book Witness, quoted by William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review August 6, 2001 (adding “I remembered the gratitude Chambers felt” on receiving it.
“Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation.”
Charles Mackay Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
In my latest Epoch Times column I explain why I didn’t berate a guy over Ukraine just because he had a Russian accent.
“‘All ‘progressive’ thought has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain…. Hitler, because in his joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.’”
Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Atlantic Monthly February 2002
“We deliberate not about ends but about means.”
Aristotle Ethics
In my latest Epoch Times column I denounce the Canadian Forces’ proposed plan for military chaplains as an Orwellian project in which uniformity is diversity, exclusion is inclusion and freedom is slavery.
“It is a pressing problem for a credible theology, second only to the problem of suffering, to give some satisfactory account of why the diversity of religious affirmations should not lead us to the conclusion that they are merely the expression of culturally determined opinions. Kenneth Cragg reminds us that even in the seventeenth century John Bunyan felt the difficulty. In Grace Abounding he wrote, ‘Everyone doth think his own religion rightest, both Jews and Moors and Pagans: and how if our faith, and Christ, and scriptures, should be but a think so too?’ Of course, there is unquestionably a degree of cultural determination in our actual religious beliefs. If I had grown up in Saudi Arabia, rather than in England, it would be foolish to deny that the chances are I would be a Muslim. But the chances are also that I would not have spent most of my life as a theoretical physicist, but that does not mean that science is simply a cultural artefact. We must not commit the genetic fallacy of supposing that origin explains away the content of belief.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist