In my latest National Post column I say the Ottawa tornado is a worrying reminder of how fragile our modern high-tech just-in-time way of life really is.

"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."

Often attributed to Immanuel Kant but appears to be from Will Durant, part of Durant's effort to explain Kant's thought (whatever the merits of his analysis, Kant's often impenetrable prose style did not lend itself to bon mots)

In my latest National Post column I say the deep ideas the government solicited about preserving the welfare state regardless of what it actually does or what's going on around it seem to miss the point.

"'People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.' – Charles K. Kettering (1876-1958) American Engineer, Inventor"

www.yuni.com/quotes/kettering.html

“Darwin himself, asked about the implications of his theory for religion and morality, replied that while the idea of God was ‘beyond the scope of man’s intellect,’ man’s moral obligations were what they had always been: to ‘do his duty.’ Leslie Stephen, after abandoning the effort to derive an ethic from Darwinism, finally confessed: ‘I now believe in nothing, but I do not the less believe in morality.’ George Eliot uttered the classic statement of this secular ethic when she said that God was ‘inconceivable,’ immortality ‘unbelievable,’ but duty nonetheless ‘peremptory and absolute.’”

Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say there's nothing wrong with what the Trudeau administration tweeted about Saudi repression; it wasn't some utopian overreach to remake the world, just a statement in favour of the Canadian value of freedom.

“We have radios which can bring to everybody the best in music and literature. What we hear instead is, to a large extent, trash at the pulp magazine level or advertising which is an insult to intelligence and taste. We have the most wonderful instruments and means man has ever had, but we do not stop and ask what they are for.”

Erich Fromm Man for Himself (written in 1947)

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."

Source unclear but not Albert Einstein (a false quotation magnet on a par with Abraham Lincoln). Various diligent efforts have been made to determine its origin online (for instance here) but regardless of where it came from it has caught on because we humans make such diligent efforts to demonstrate its validity in real life.