"If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man."
G.K. Chesterton in “The Empire of the Insect” in What’s Wrong with the World, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 12 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2009).
“The study of history brings to youth the experience that is lacking to it; it can help the adolescent to overcome his most usual temptation: to be exclusive, to condemn in advance some particular tendency, person, or group; to have a vision of the universe limited only to his own vision (and if only this were a matter merely of adolescents!). At the age when it is important to confront the values received – those of his surroundings, childhood, family, or social milieu – with his own personality, the study of history would enlarge the field of this investigation… By familiarizing oneself with other times, other eras, other civilizations, one acquires the habit of distrusting criteria of one’s own time…”
Régine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle AgesPernoud TMA p. 170.
“How could man have such utter contempt for man? Because he had reached the point of contempt for God. Only a godless ideology could plan and carry out the extermination of a whole people."
John Paul II at Yad Vashem, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things October 2000
In my latest Loonie Politics column I praise John McCain's willingness to rock the boat politically even on some issues where I think he was wrong, because we need more mavericks and less partisanship.
"In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that He did not also limit his stupidity."
Konrad Adenauer, quoted at www.brainyquote.com/quotes/konrad_adenauer_121389
“I imagine that every teenager today has heard of Stalingrad and Alamein and D-Day, but I wonder how many know the name of Imphal, that ‘Flower on Lofty Heights’ where Japan suffered the greatest catastrophe in its military history. There’s no reason why they should; it was a long way away.”
George Macdonald Fraser Quartered Safe Out Here
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say there's nothing wrong with what the Trudeau administration tweeted about Saudi repression; it wasn't some utopian overreach to remake the world, just a statement in favour of the Canadian value of freedom.