“It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program – on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off – than on any positive task.”
Friedrich Hayek The Road to Serfdom
“A man who shows no resentment at being slapped is overwhelmed with insults and forced into need.”
Blaise Pascal Pensées
“A man is destroyed by the inner conviction of uselessness.”
E.B. Schumacher Small is Beautiful
“a sleeping fool may pass for a wise man.”
One of the minor villains in Sax Rohmer The Trail of Fu Manchu
“Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot/ That it do singe yourself.”
Shakespeare, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“For it is the nature of the many to be ruled by fear rather than by shame, and to refrain from evil not because of the disgrace but because of the punishments. Living under the sway of their feelings, they pursue their own pleasures and the means of obtaining them, and shun the pains that are their opposites; but of that which is fine and truly pleasurable they have not even a conception, because they have never had a taste of it.”
Aristotle Ethics
In my latest National Post column, I say the Prime Minister’s real problem in fighting to keep Enbridge 5 open is that he actually believes fossil fuels are worse than useless.
“I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.”
Charles Dickens, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail June 20, 2000