“‘France may be a predominantly Roman Catholic country, but it is also officially secular, with separation of church and state one of its most sacred tenets.’ – New York Times, April 8”

The Wall St. Journal's OpinionJournal April 8, 2005 [under the very appropriate headline “If It’s Sacred, Doesn’t It Violate Itself?”]

In my latest National Post column I say John Le Carré’s novels were morally rotten and dangerous in practice.

“We must take human nature as we find it. Perfection falls not to the share of mortals.”

George Washington to John Jay August 8, 1786, in W.B. Allen Washington, George. A Collection.

“We need metaphors of magic and monsters in order to understand the human condition.”

Stephen Donaldson, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 25, 2007 [to which I add “Yes, but why?”]

“To die for one's country means to live forever”.

A letter from Marko Milosevic about his father Slobodan, who did not have a priest at his interment because he was an atheist, quoted with appropriate critique in OpinionJournal March 20, 2006

“Tourism was the source of history’s original failure of cultural understanding. Cyril Aldred writes that ancient Greek and Roman vacationers in Egypt ‘never really understood Egyptian religion and were inclined to see in inexplicable acts and beliefs a more profound significance than actually existed.’ Thus the concept of the ‘inscrutable Orient,’ the idea of the ‘mysterious East.’”

P.J. O’Rourke in The Atlantic Monthly September 2002

“Political conflict, domestic or international, is rooted in the nature of man. It is a reflection of his finitude, his moral weakness, and his irrationality.”

Ernest W. Lefever Ethics and United States Foreign Policy

“It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word. The Crusade without the Cross is a dead word.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 12, 1924, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol 10 #5 (March 2007)