“There is no limit to the amount of nonsense one can produce if you think too long alone.”

Jacob Viner, quoted by Bernard J. Shapiro, Principal, McGill University, to the Empire Club of Canada, Toronto, May 22, 1997, in Canadian Speeches Vol. XI, #4 (July/August 1997)

In my latest Nstional Post column I say the meaning of life is not to be found in the latest gadget even if it is a watch that can tell you your blood oxygen level every three seconds.

“there is still more in us of the chimp than the baboon.”

Elaine Morgan The Descent of Woman

In my latest National Post column I say the search for life in space is boooring because only life with photosynthesis is interesting and even if we find it, which seems highly unlikely, it won’t solve any of our moral or even technological problems here on Earth.

“You understand that you’re a short-term phenomenon, like the mosquitoes that come in the spring and the fall. You get a perspective on yourself. You’re getting back to the fundamentals of the planet. Neil feels that way, because we’ve talked about it.”

A friend on why first-man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrong loves his farm, quoted in Ottawa Citizen July 16, 1999

“As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forest and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries…. Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails.”

Michael Oakeshott “The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind” in Rationalism in politics and other essays