“Some apparent advantages followed for a season from a rule which had its origin in a violent and perfidious usurpation, and which was upheld by all the arts of moral corruption, political enervation, and military repression. The advantages lasted long enough to create in this country a steady and powerful opinion that Napoleon the Third's early crime was redeemed by the seeming prosperity which followed. Not often in history has the great truth that ‘morality is the nature of things’ received corroboration so prompt and timely.”

John Morley On Compromise

In my latest National Post column I say we should have seen chaos coming in Libya when we moved to oust Gadhafi.

“One sword keeps another in the sheath.”

George Herbert on Brainy Quote (www.brainyquote.com/quotes/george_herbert_152910)

“[D]o not men die fast enough, without destroying each other?"

Francois de Salignac, The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses

“Study history, study history – in history lie all the secrets of statecraft.”

Winston Churchill to the author, then an 18-year-old exchange student (in the receiving line at the May 1953 Commonwealth Parliamentary Association), quoted in James C. Humes Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Statecraft

In my latest National Post column I say that acts of evil, including the mass shooting at two New Zealand mosques, result from deliberate cultivating of evil thoughts.

“Unmaking the bomb (as I’ve written before) is like trying to un-eat the forbidden fruit. Leaving the Tree of Knowledge alone might have been a better choice, but it’s a bit too late for that. Pretending it never happened isn’t a useful idea. God had good reasons for his dietary restrictions in the Garden of Eden, arbitrary as they may have seemed to his critics, then and since.”

George Jonas in National Post August 8, 2015 (defending the use of nuclear weapons to end World War II; interestingly, Jonas was not a believer)