“Nous n’avouons de petits défauts que pour persuader que nous n’en avons pas de grands.”
Réflexions morales #327 in La Rochefoucauld Maximes
“The underlying cause of the dependent underclass… is a subset of that fact [Solzhenitsyn’s explanation of the Soviet nightmare “Man has forgotten God”]: ‘American policymakers have forgotten God.’”
Tom Bethell, quoting Marvin Olasky, in Turning Back the Welfare State: A Report on a Major Conference of the Claremont Institute (1994)
“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