"If you cannot mould yourself as you would wish, how can you expect other people to be entirely to your liking?" Thomas à Kempis, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Globe and Mail October 21, 2002
"What has happened, can happen." Aristotle, quoted by Conor Cruise O’Brien in The Siege (with specific reference to the Holocaust)
"It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe." James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance, 1785" according to The Federalist Patriot Founders' Quote Daily November 22, 2005 (from Federalist.com)
"Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality..." Blaise Pascal, Pensées
"If man is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head." G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 20, 1907, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #6 (April-May 2008)
In my latest National Post column I say that closing ranks to defeat Marine Le Pen while ignoring the sources of the discontent she taps into would be to forget the lessons of Donald Trump if, indeed, people ever learned any.
"Suddenly it becomes evident that things which for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be manufacture right here on earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods of destruction and therapy. To these people (and they are more numerous in any large city than we like to admit) the totalitarian hell proves only that the power of man is greater than they ever dared to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the earth open…. Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgement: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope." Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, with specific reference to film footage from Nazi concentration camps