“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
“Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he has not created himself – and is nevertheless free. Because having once been hurled into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, quoted by Alberto Knox in Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy
“We live surrounded by mysteries and imagine that by inventing names we explain them.”
W.B. Seabrook, “Goat-Cry, Girl-Cry,” in Chancellor Press Great Ghost Stories
In my latest National Post column I remind commentators that Notre Dame is a Paris “tourist attraction” and historical landmark because it’s a very beautiful church, and suggest that it’s beautiful because of the faith that built it.
In Convivium I warn that AI threatens our humanity almost as much if it does work as it threatens humanity if it runs amok.
“The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.”
G.K. Chesterton in the introduction to The Defendant