"The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them."
G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #7
"Truth unasserted is a lie unopposed."
George Jonas in the National Post Dec. 11, 2010
"As one writer put it in the Wall St. Journal, when cowards ascend to positions of leadership, their character is revealed. They panic in a crisis. They don’t know what to do."
R. Cort Kirkwood in Ottawa Sun Dec. 20, 1998
"Amateurs practice until they can get it right; professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong."
"Anonymous", quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail Dec. 27, 2004
"It will not do to offer democracy, secularism and licentious living as an alternative to religious extremism. The answer to bad religion is good religion — to put it more elegantly, theology is required to answer the false claims of unreasonable religious positions."
Fr. Raymond J. De Souza in National Post January 31, 2008 (after favourably quoting George Weigel's claim that "It is thus a great folly to think that jihadism and the terrorism it underwrites can be understood in terms drawn primarily from the patois of the therapeutic society, as if jihadist terrorism were some Levantine form of psychiatric aberration. Within their own theological frame of reference and the reading of history it warrants, jihadists are not crazy. They make, to themselves, a terrible kind of sense.")
"a hurricane in a pawnshop"
Tom Carson (specifically re Jane Fonda's life, reviewing Fonda's My Life So Far) in The Atlantic Monthly July-August 2005
"There are some people - and I am one of them - who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe."
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in William James Pragmatism
In my latest National Post column I say government regulation of Facebook would actually make a bad situation worse, that it's censorship, and that self-control beats state control.