“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”
Charlie Chaplin, quoted in Globe & Mail March 24, 1999
“by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
The king of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
“In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it. This is because there is nothing that can take its place.”
“That the weak overcomes the strong/ And the submissive overcomes the hard/ Everyone in the world knows yet no one can put/ This knowledge into practice.”
Lao Tzu II.LXXVIII.186-187
“You can no more evade in politics the question, What is true in religion? than you can do sums right without prejudice to a difference of opinion upon the multiplication table.”
James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty Equality Fraternity
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the idea of national strategies where governments reform citizens is bad, including if one targets “Islamophobia”.
“He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.”
Edmund Burke in his “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol”, cited in Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics & Belief
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the difficulty people have condemning calls for churches to burn is a worrying sign of our rapid descent into a vindictive and pitiless neopagan mindset.
“Did someone already make the point that if faith in God is absurd, faith in man is pitiful?”
Again I quote myself, a thought prompted on August 14, 2001 by forced abortions in the People’s Republic of China