“As to fighting, keep out of it if you can, by all means. When the time comes, if it ever should, that you have to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a challenge to fight, say ‘No’ if you can – only take care you make it clear to yourselves why you say ‘No.’ It’s a proof of the highest courage, if done from true Christian motives. It’s quite right and justifiable, if done from a simple aversion to physical pain and danger. But don’t say ‘No’ because you fear a licking, and say or think it’s because you fear God, for that’s neither Christian nor honest. And if you do fight, fight it out; and don’t give in while you can stand and see.”

Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays

“Human beings can control their own acts, but not the consequences of their acts to themselves or to others. Society can subject the distribution of wealth to whatever rules it thinks best: but what practical results will flow from the operation of those rules, must be discovered, like any other physical or mental truths, by observation and reasoning.”

John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, quoted in Thomas Sowell, Classical Economics Reconsidered

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